In Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, New York Times Reporter Tim Weiner takes a hard look at the spy agency’s track record.
The CIA missed the 9/11 attacks and struck out on Iraqi WMDs. What else has it gotten wrong?
It missed the first Soviet atomic bomb. The Suez Canal Crisis: missed it. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, when the Shah of Iran fell—big surprises. The fall of the Berlin Wall—big surprise. The first great disaster was the Korean war. The CIA missed the advent of the war, and China’s entry. It dropped thousands of agents behind the lines in North Korea and China; barely one came back.
That last is one of many botched covert operations—coup attempts, insurgencies, assassinations—that you autopsy. Should the CIA drop covert ops and stick to spying?
The CIA was not created to be a paramilitary police force. It was created to understand what’s going on by stealing secrets and analyzing all source information. We are not good at this, and we’ve got to get good.
Do CIA covert operations like secret prisons and extraordinary renditions help its intelligence-gathering?
None of this is new. Through the 1950s, the CIA had secret prisons for the interrogation of suspected double agents. The navy brig that was converted for the CIA was like Guantanamo. "Extraordinary" techniques were used: drugs, what the Geneva Convention would define as torture, interrogations that went on for years. Professional intelligence officers would tell you that torture doesn’t work and that it’s un-American. The CIA didn’t ask for this job; the President of the United States told them to do it.
How did you pierce the CIA’s veil of secrecy?
Intelligence officers and reporters are much the same. We want to know secrets—what makes people tick, how the world works. So it’s almost natural for intelligence officers and reporters to sit down and talk. Also, there has been an avalanche of declassification of secret documents, and I’ve been able to find oral histories and interview ten Directors of Central Intelligence. This is about as complete a mosaic as can be assembled.
Ex-CIA Director George Tenet told you that the way to change the agency is to "blow it up." Do you agree?
What he meant was creative destruction, to rebuild it from the ground up. To have a CIA that is what it should be—an extremely knowledgeable corps of worldly Americans—will take a generation, starting with an effort to educate high school and college students in the languages, history and cultures of the rest of the world. You can’t live in a cul-de-sac in suburban Virginia. You have to live in the world’s most dangerous places, drink muddy water and sleep on stones, the way the people you’re trying to get at live.
