Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
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Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA Customer Reviews
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How do you write a definitive history of a clandestine agency? Like his subject, author Tim Weiner gets a standing pass on the assumption that at least three-quarters of the story is below the surface and never really can be told.
The narrative is somewhat jerky. Much of the book is a series of cubistic portraits of Agency Directors and Assistant Directors, and the public outlines of their known successes and failures. Keeping minor characters straight is a real challenge. This deficiency is amplified by the framing structure of the book, which is a chronology by presidential administration, within which the history is filled in anecdotally. One can almost see the author trying to organize his note cards and abandoning in frustration the effort to weave them together in a cohesive whole. The book clearly is in need of a more forceful editor.
The focus of the later chapters is on the semi-public unraveling of the Agency as it fails to define its post-Cold War mission and ends up as the purveyor of what it thinks its leaders want to hear. Throughout, however, the sense one gets is of colossal failure and ineptitude, punctuated by morally repugnant successes in destabilizing foreign governments, some of them democratically elected but ideologically unacceptable. It causes one to shiver at the thought of what has been done around the world in our name. After all, the fundamental tool of the Agency is the breaking of the laws of other nations in the name of American self-interest.
I came away from this book feeling as though I really did not know anything more of consequence about its subject than I did when I started. As a result, I can't recommend it.
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