Legacy of Ashes

[Ron Ecker]

Saw an impressive-looking book in the bookstore entitled Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, by Tim Weiner.

I looked up the JFK assassination in the index. There's a short section, the upshot of which seems to be that Castro did it. From my quick perusal, the notion that the CIA might have been involved is not even considered.

Morales, who I think probably qualifies as a usual suspect in the case, is not even in the index.

Just wanted to point this out before any JFK researchers spend their money on this book.

[Mark Stapleton]

Saw an impressive-looking book in the bookstore entitled Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, by Tim Weiner.

I looked up the JFK assassination in the index. There's a short section, the upshot of which seems to be that Castro did it. From my quick perusal, the notion that the CIA might have been involved is not even considered.

Morales, who I think probably qualifies as a usual suspect in the case, is not even in the index.

Just wanted to point this out before any JFK researchers spend their money on this book.

Good call, Ron.

How good could the book be when he's already demonstrated that he is plainly wrong about an issue like JFK's murder.

[Charles Drago]

Ron,

You beg an issue which, to me at least, is of great significance: The Litmus Test.

I'll address it in a new thread.

Charles

[Nathaniel Heidenheimer]

Ron I diatribed about this book in a thread a while back. It may as well have been written by Richard Helms. I wrote a quick angry review of it on Amazon, it is the one under the name Boyce Hart. I think it would be worthwhile if someone with more patience could write one.

However much we may scoff at it, it has been a bestseller, and lots will get it for Christmas. Imagine my chagrin when the author was invited several times on WBAI, the so-called leftist radio station in NYC. Just so, Encounter Magazine--the moat is dug between the left liberals, and the further left.

I could only tollerate reading the first half, before becomming parallyzed by a spellcheck and an attack of spleen. Guess who killed Diem from Washington? Did you know that John McCone was one of the strongest DCI's ever? etc.

Please write a lot of reviews on Amazon. There needs to be way more warnings about this book! Also Amazon has a new feature in which you can promote other truer books, but putting the clickable book title into your review. I THINK THIS COULD BE A VERY USEFULL WAY OF GETTING MORE READERS FOR SOME MUCH BETTER BOOKS ABOUT THE ASSASSINATION.

[Peter Fokes]

Legacy of Ashes is an important book imo, but folks who prefer not to stray too far from the topic of the assassination of JFK may find his in-depth examination of CIA flaws of little interest. His brief dissection of the reign of Porter Goss is revealing. Goss served as a hatchet man for Bush and made sure the Bush ideology was entrenched at all levels of the agency. It is amusing to see the CIA blamed for destruction of tapes when one can be fairly certain such an act was condoned by the Administration itself. It is frightening indeed to read how the agency is now merely an outcrop of the military. As Weiner notes: The Pentagon has crushed the agency, and Ike's nightmare has become a reality.

As for the assassination, Weiner seems to adopt the Helmsian view that, yes, there is doubt and such doubt might remain forever. In his view, the one slim prospect for discovery of a "smoking gun" - so to speak - might reside in secret files in Cuba or the Soviet Union.

On alt.assassination.jfk, we have been discussing Weiner's brief recounting of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and the failure of NSA to make clear to LBJ that a communique has been misinterpreted. It was too late anyway. The bombs had started falling.

I'm afraid I do not agree with those researchers who simply want nothing to do with the book.

Regards

Peter Fokes

Edited December 21, 2007 by Peter Fokes

[Nathaniel Heidenheimer]

By all means read it and make up your own mind. In my opinion it would DANGEROUS to ignore it, as I think it is a vehicle of disinformation. That is why I tried

very hard to draw attention to it about six months ago. I think it is having a HUGE impact among the many people who will only have a glancing encounter with

the Kennedy Assassination. In fact this glancing approach might be the most efficient approach lone nutters can take at this point. (Mrs Paine's Garage). It is not going to be possible to DIRECTLY defend Lone Nutism much longer.

Edited December 21, 2007 by Nathaniel Heidenheimer

[William Kelly]

<H1 class=documentFirstHeading>https://www.cia.gov/news-information/press-releases-statements/legacy-of-ashes.html

The CIA is no stranger to criticism. Intelligence work, focused as it is on the uncertain, the unknown, and the deliberately hidden, comes with great difficulty and risk. There will be shortcomings and unpleasant surprises. That said, Tim Weiner’s recently published book, Legacy of Ashes, paints far too dark a picture of the agency’s past. Backed by selective citations, sweeping assertions, and a fascination with the negative, Weiner overlooks, minimizes, or distorts agency achievements.

In 1948, the CIA accurately assessed the chances of war with the Soviets as nil. According to Weiner, that was a failure “because no one listened.” The development of the U-2 spyplane was a stunning technological achievement that offered a unique look behind the Iron Curtain. To Weiner, it is tied to failure, because the CIA should have had better human sources inside the Soviet Union. Through analytic rigor, the agency made a near-perfect forecast of the 1967 Mideast War. Weiner attributes it wholly to information from a foreign intelligence service. The CIA offered accurate and timely warning of Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, a fact Weiner obscures in his narrative.

Those are but a few examples. The story of Pyotr Popov, the CIA’s first major Soviet spy, gets very short shrift. Weiner rightly speaks of the Soviet sources killed by the treachery of Aldrich Ames, yet never mentions the skill it took to recruit those sources or the intelligence they provided the United States. Time and again, Weiner takes things to the darkest corner of the room. He knows better. In promoting his book, he says the design and deployment of intelligence satellites and the study of imagery from them “helped keep the Cold War cold.” That in itself was no minor achievement.

Despite its claims to be “the” history of the CIA, the book is marked by errors great and small. Here is a relatively brief, and admittedly incomplete, catalogue:

• The book’s first few paragraphs mistakenly assert that President Harry Truman never wanted the CIA to engage in covert action. But he signed National Security Council (NSC) directives assigning responsibility for covert action to the CIA—at a time when CIA officials were skeptical about taking on this mission. Weiner himself notes in the book that Truman’s NSC approved 81 covert CIA actions.
  

• The book points out that covert actions are undertaken at the behest of the President to achieve specific ends at specific times. To Weiner, those objectives are illegitimate, to be viewed solely through the prism of events decades later, as though you can draw a simple, straight, decisive line of causation through years of complicated history.
  
• The book states that a 1952 operation in Manchuria undertaken by two CIA officers, Dick Fecteau and Jack Downey, was a personnel rescue mission. In fact, the purpose of the operation was to recover documents.
  
• The book charges that Frank Wisner, a pioneer of the agency’s covert operations, successfully resisted Director of Central Intelligence Walter Bedell Smith’s order to cancel ineffective ones. But a major Asian program was shut down in 1953—on Wisner’s watch as the head of CIA’s covert operations.
  
• The book states that the National Security Agency (NSA) was created in response to an interception and decryption program that was compromised in 1949. In fact, the NSA was established in 1952 to correct serious problems with military signals intelligence during the Korean War.
  
• The book alleges that the CIA used Radio Free Europe to spark the 1956 Hungarian uprising. But Weiner’s main source for this idea is a Radio Free Europe memo that was written after the uprising.
  
• The book suggests that the CIA didn’t predict the collapse of the Soviet Union. As a number of prominent outside observers have noted, the agency had warned of trouble signs in the Soviet Union on regular occasions since the 1970s.
  
• The book states that current CIA Director Michael Hayden is the first active duty military officer to lead the agency since Walter Bedell Smith in the 1950s. But Stansfield Turner was an active duty admiral in the U.S. Navy during the first two years of his tenure as Director of Central Intelligence.
  

Even Weiner’s telling of his juiciest tale, involving the American ambassador to Guatemala, is gravely flawed. There is much less to this than Weiner suggests—for starters, the supposed intelligence on which it is based did not even come from the CIA or a CIA source. As is so often the case, there is more than one side to the story. But you would not know that from Weiner’s book.

What of the CIA today? This is the agency that did much to oust the Taliban from Afghanistan after 9/11 and collapse the Al-Qa’ida safe haven there. This is the agency that unraveled the A.Q. Khan proliferation network and learned enough about Libya’s nuclear program to persuade Tripoli to step back from it. And the agency that has helped foil terrorist plots and erode the structure and leadership of a terrorist movement that is extremely dangerous and highly adaptable. Weiner’s verdict: These skilled and dedicated officers are “the weakest cadre of spies and analysts in the history of the CIA.”

The agency makes no claims to perfection—far from it. We strive each day to learn from our successes and failures. Not even Weiner can claim that the CIA shrinks from its past. The huge volume of material we have declassified, rare for an intelligence service, underscores the point. With a strong range of sources, Tim Weiner had an opportunity to write a balanced history of a complex, important subject. But he did not. His bias overwhelms his scholarship. One cannot learn the true story of the CIA from Legacy of Ashes.

</H1>

[Peter Fokes]

Ah yes.

One would not expect the CIA to shower praises on Weiner's book.

And what of this .... "The huge volume of material we have declassified ....."

Lovely. Now that a court has ordered the CIA to review its records on George Joannides, perhaps the agency will be able to ADD to that huge volume with some slender files on this "mysterious fella" -- to borrow a phrase from LBJ!

Regards and Happy Holidays

Peter Fokes

Edited December 21, 2007 by Peter Fokes

[Nathaniel Heidenheimer]

It doesn't surprise me that the CIA is trying to build up this book as a tell-all. Who would want to buy an authorized history-- well there's The Nation magazine. By building up the books muckraking stature, it can more easily sow disinformation.