Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner

July 3, 2007 by admin

wfzimmerman’s review: “Just received the review copy of this book. My first reaction is that it is a must for anyone who reads books about intelligence — it is the first single-volume history of the CIA’s entire lifetime written completely from original sources and without using classifed or unattributed data. (For which the author deserves maximum kudos!)

That being said, I am not entirely satisfied with the book — I have a nagging feeling that it’s written at the wrong level of resolution. By which I mean it is focused on providing narrative accounts of the activities of a relatively few high-level managers and Washington bureaucrats, rather than providing a detailed operational assessment of the CIA’s effectiveness.

The author is clearly aware that such assessments exist — he draws on them extensively in early chapters, for example in the discussion of the suicidal (and rather provocative from today’s perspective!) missions to paradrop hundreds if not thousands agents into the Soviet Union, China, and Korea during the 1950s.

I found myself hungering for some synthesis tables — a list, perhaps, of publicly documented CIA projects in the 50s and 60s, and their outcomes. In essence, I am wishing that this book was written by a worldly academic rather than a journalist. This is an "inside the Beltway" Woodward-style story, rather than an operational history. I can’t blame the author for this choice, since in all likelihood the audience for a Woodward-style book is at least 10x the audience for an operational history, but it does mean that the book has a hard time living up to its advance billing as a complete history of the CIA.

More later, as I read on.”
Doubleday (2007), Hardcover, 720 pages
tags: First edition, intelligence, CIA

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