Intelligent Design?

The widespread public perception that the U.S. intelligence agencies chronically perform poorly has created a receptive audience for a slew of books and articles that both exploit and help to perpetuate misunderstandings. The most recent and most prominent specimen of this genre is Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes, which won the 2007 National Book Award for nonfiction -- but probably would have been a better candidate in the category of fiction. His much-heralded history of the CIA is a selective and haphazard treatment of the agency's record. The book's heft and alleged grounding in historical legwork (Weiner says in his preface that he read "more than fifty thousand documents") have earned Legacy of Ashes laudatory reviews. However, readers who know a little bit about the CIA and anything about historical research will not react so favorably to Weiner's work.

Weiner portrays an agency careening out of control, with adventure-hungry (and often alcohol-sodden) officers doing the driving. The book's scope is also extremely narrow: Weiner focuses disproportionately on the CIA's early days. The agency, according to Weiner, has been so enraptured with covert action that it has devoted too little energy and attention to collecting foreign intelligence. Legacy of Ashes offers little about two of the CIA's core intelligence functions, the collection of technical information and intelligence analysis, and not much more about the third, espionage. There is no mention, for example, of the CIA's revolutionary A-12 Oxcart spy plane program -- a crucially important technical-collection program during the 1960s. The A-12 was the precursor to the air force's SR-71, the premier U.S. reconnaissance aircraft for over 20 years. Nor does intelligence analysis get much attention. Among many significant omissions, Weiner fails to refer to the assessments from the CIA's Saigon station that anticipated the 1968 Tet offensive, even though President Lyndon Johnson and his national security adviser, Walt Rostow, later cited these reports in claiming that the Tet offensive had not surprised them. (Weiner's only paragraph on Tet portrays the CIA as totally in the dark about the enemy's intentions.) Nor does Weiner mention the CIA analysis that anticipated the Six-Day War of 1967; instead, he attributes Washington's lack of surprise to a single tip from Israel. And there is not a word about the intelligence community's prescient analysis before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, which anticipated the civil strife, terrorism, and instability that ensued.

Weiner's loose treatment of the historical record begins with the book's title. The phrase "legacy of ashes" comes from a remark made by President Dwight Eisenhower at a National Security Council meeting near the end of his presidency, but Weiner conflates two events and completely misrepresents Eisenhower's words. According to Weiner's account, the CIA director, Allen Dulles, was arguing against a proposal to separate his office's responsibilities from oversight of the broader intelligence community (as legislation in 2004 eventually did). Weiner quotes Eisenhower angrily complaining -- ostensibly in response -- that the structure of U.S. intelligence was faulty and that the failure to reform it would "leave a legacy of ashes." In fact, Eisenhower was not responding to Dulles, with whom he agreed about leaving the CIA director's job intact; the president had made his remark at a different NSC meeting a week earlier, and he was not talking about the CIA at all. Rather, his remark concerned how military intelligence had been stitched together during World War II.

The historical inaccuracies continue in the first sentence of Chapter 1, where Weiner claims, "All Harry Truman wanted was a newspaper." Citing a letter Truman wrote to an aide many years after he left office in which he claimed that he had never wanted the CIA to be a "Cloak & Dagger Outfit," Weiner concludes that Truman simply wanted the agency to be a source for global news. But the documented history of the Truman administration's use of the CIA to conduct extensive covert operations during the early Cold War years strongly contradicts that notion. Weiner's use of source material throughout Legacy of Ashes follows in the same vein. Damning quotations are cherry-picked, episodes are chosen to highlight failures and exclude successes, conversations are distorted, presidential desires are misrepresented, and sweeping judgments and naked assertions are made with no apparent reference to any of those 50,000 documents.

Legacy of Ashes does accurately illustrate how the agency has been at the mercy of shifting political winds for decades. This is perhaps the only element of the book relevant to current debates over intelligence reform. Legacy of Ashes is not a history of the CIA, much less the history that the subtitle promises. It is largely a collection of tales of derring-do, deceit, and defeat. This highly tendentious book should be viewed the same way as a good novel: a lively read not to be trusted as history.

BLIND FAITH

Amy Zegart's Spying Blind also exploits the public's attention to intelligence failures. Zegart confesses in her preface that she was researching the difficulties faced by U.S. government agencies attempting to adapt to new challenges when 9/11 suddenly supplied the perfect dramatic event to illustrate her argument. She has therefore tailored her depiction of the official reaction to 9/11 to fit her broad preexisting thesis: that traits inherent to any large organization, especially a government agency, prevent it from adapting well to new challenges and new missions.