LEGACY OF ASHES - TIM WEINER

Since getting on my CIA shit a few years ago, maybe 2 at this point, I’ve often wondered why there isn’t a book like this, by which I mean a sort of grand overview. Most of the books I’ve read take a small piece of CIA history and investigate it deeply, like The Jakarta Method or The Phoenix Program. Even books that cover a lot of different events, like The Devil’s Chessboard, don’t cover the agency from its beginnings as the OSS in WWII until present day. So I was hyped to read this book, especially after reading that the CIA itself, along with some other mainstream publications, accused the book of being unfairly critical of the CIA. Turns out, that’s all bullshit, this book manages to slightly critique the agency while covering up or eliding all the worst things they did. At the risk of sounding paranoid,it’s almost the textbook definition of a limited hang-out. Let’s take a small example, MKULTRA gets a short treatment in this book, it mentions the part about giving unsuspecting folks LSD and makes the whole thing sound like a waste of time and money. It mentions the Frank Olson story, perhaps the go-to anecdote about MK excesses (despite the fact that they did much, much worse, you can read Poisoner in Chief if you wanna go down the MK rabbit hole) but it gives the sanitized version. In this version, Olson is given LSD,jumps out a window and the CIA covers it up for years before coming clean. This isn’t a good explanation as to what actually happened. Olson was given LSD without his knowledge, but he jumped out a window 9 days after he was dosed, he wasn’t high when he fell. Additionally, Olson was almost certainly working on chemical/biological weapons that the US was deploying during the Korean War and it seems like the CIA was concerned the LSD experience might make him talk. Not for nothing, the KUBARK manual, a CIA training guide declassified in the 90’s mentions throwing someone out a window as the best assassination technique. So here we have Weiner giving the “best” version of a bad story, where the CIA seems incompetent and silly, not murderous and evil. But that’s a minor incident involving one man, to take a larger example, the book gives pages and pages to a failed coup attempt in Indonesia in ‘58, which makes the CIA seem fumbling and stupid. Later, we get only a short paragraph about the successful CIA-backed coup in ‘65 which lead to one of the largest mass-killings in the 20th century. Weiner quotes a state department official saying that they did not give death-lists to the right-wing generals to carry out a leftist purge, which is 100% untrue, we definitely did, as we gave death-lists to right-wing governments across the world (like in the trans-South American Operation Condor, which gets nary a mention in this book). The book also lists the death toll for Indonesia at 500k which is half of the real number of leftist killed with our support and backing. You can read the Jakarta Method if you’d like a better picture of what happened in Indonesia and the CIA’s role there. It goes on and on like that. It briefly mentions that the CIA might have been involved with Mandela’s arrest in South Africa, when not only where they involved we know the officer’s name (Dan Richard), it mentions Iran/Contra but none of the stuff about smuggling drugs (not even to refute it, even if you think that these rumors were unfounded and the CIA would never do something like that, which I think would make you very wrong and naive, it does seem worth mentioning that John Deutch, the then director went to South Central in ‘96 to discuss and refute the widespread belief that they were responsible for the devastating crack epidemic), it obviously glosses over the more fringe-y assassination stuff (it doesn’t even mention the suggestion that they were involved with RFK and makes the insane suggestion that the CIA covered up the JFK assassination in the sense that they knew the Soviets were involved and wanted to conceal this knowledge to prevent WWIII. This is a belief so strange and ahistorical it’s hard to know where to start with it.). It makes the 9/11 and Iraq failures seem like tragic mistakes, the book literally calls Tenet a tragic figure, but doesn’t mention the many, many instances of pre-9/11 intelligence being withheld from the FBI (and the subsequent lying about these withholding). Overall the book manages to be both anti-CIA and too light on them. It sees them as bumbling and over-confident when the actual picture is much darker. It’s the American perpetual innocence mindset that plagues our history and dooms us to repeat it and the rest of the world to suffer over and over. There are tons of better books to read about the CIA and what they’re actually up to. I do hope that someone will someday synthesize these into an easy to read overview of their total history but this ain’t it. 47 Legacies