Book review: Legacy of Ashes

This time, a book recommendation! Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes, the 2007 National Book Award winner for non-fiction.

The book is exactly that, a history of the CIA from its founding to 9/11 and beyond. In my opinion, this is one of those books that anyone really interested in the way the world works today, or in global history from 1950 onward, needs to read this.

Weiner draws together a narrative of the CIA's history, and highlights the one fact that has very often been its most conspicuous trait: sheer incompetence. As Weiner explains, the agency's covert operations have been at best questionable and at worst downright amateurish.

A far more serious failure has been the CIA's failing as an organization providing intelligence to the President. Over the years, the CIA's analysts and intelligence gatherers have consistently been neglected in favor of covert operations, sabotage, election-rigging and assassination. Having read Weiner's book, it's fair to ask what, exactly, a succession of American presidents and intelligence decision-makers imagined the job of an intelligence agency to be? It certainly doesn't seem to have been gathering intelligence.

How good is the book? So good, in fact, that the CIA has issued a rather sniffy rebuttal. This prompted my co-blogger Juho, currently reading the book, to wonder how long it took them to realize it had been published.

There's also a longer review of the book on the CIA website, where they lambast it for some factual errors. I'm in no position to disagree with them, but as something of a historian, in my opinion the most signal merit of Weiner's book is that it has such explanatory power. This account of America's consistent failure to supply its decisionmakers with good intelligence goes a long way toward expaining some of that nation's greatest failures in the 20th century.

A significant trend that develops very early in the book is the distortion on intelligence to fit either the White House's or the CIA's political agenda. As this book makes manifestly clear, the Iraqi WMD episode was not the first time intelligence data was manipulated to serve political ends. As it stands, it won't be the last.

This book will expand your understanding of the political history of our world immensely. A must-read.