Legacy of Ashes

Legacy of Ashes is a history of the Central Intelligence Agency from its founding in 1947 to the wreckage of the Iraq intelligence failures, and its argument is in the title: six decades on, the agency built to prevent another Pearl Harbor has a record, in Tim Weiner's accounting, of chronic failure punctuated by catastrophe. Weiner, who covered intelligence for the New York Times and won a Pulitzer for his reporting on the secret budget, set himself an unusual discipline for a book about a secret agency: no anonymous sources, no blind quotes, everything drawn from declassified documents, oral histories, and interviews on the record, including with ten directors of central intelligence. From that record he builds the famous catalog: the coups in Iran and Guatemala whose long consequences outran their short victories, the Bay of Pigs, the years of failed operations against the Soviet bloc in which nearly every agent dropped behind the lines was captured or turned, the missed collapse of the Soviet Union itself, and the run up to September 11 and Iraq. The through line is the tension between covert action, which presidents demand, and patient espionage and analysis, which the country actually needs and the agency repeatedly shortchanged. The book won the 2007 National Book Award for Nonfiction and became a bestseller; intelligence historians pushed back hard, arguing Weiner cherry picked the failures and slighted the successes, a debate readers should know exists. As a documented narrative of what the secret government did in America's name, it has no real rival.