Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
by Tim Weiner
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Book Summary Information
Author: Tim WeinerEdition: Hardcover
Format: Bargain Price
Published: 2007-06-28
ISBN: N/A
Number of pages: 448
Publisher: Doubleday
Book Reviews of Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
Book Review: Poignant questions from the Ashes
Summary: 4 Stars
What is most compelling to me about the book is how hard the actual mission is. How do you employ people who must lie, keep secrets and yet maintain balance and honor? How do you not expand your mission to personal missions with grand agendas, fueled by alcohol and bi-polar leaders whose sense of mission is bizarre? How do you keep the agency on its original track, gather intelligence? How do you keep it independent from micro-management, yet not let the agency usurp democracy? The task is almost impossible, and we have not done well with it; the Legacy of Ashes was Ike's phrase, and along with his Military Industrial complex speech, he saw the hazards of misguided, over-empowered narcissists, who unfortunately tend to rise to positions of leadership in most systems. Sadly, the agency, as it stood at the end of his book, had squandered billions, many lives and is left in a pool of political and internal dysfunction. I sure do hope Panetta is a genius in terms of managment and ethics; the agency needs someone who can breathe life and clarity into an agency that never really stayed true to its mission.
Summary of Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
For the last sixty years, the CIA has managed to maintain a formidable reputation in spite of its terrible record, burying its blunders in top-secret archives. Its mission was to know the world. When it did not succeed, it set out to change the world. Its failures have handed us, in the words of President Eisenhower, ?a legacy of ashes.?Now Pulitzer Prize?winning author Tim Weiner offers the first definitive history of the CIA?and everything is on the record. LEGACY OF ASHES is based on more than 50,000 documents, primarily from the archives of the CIA itself, and hundreds of interviews with CIA veterans, including ten Directors of Central Intelligence. It takes the CIA from its creation after World War II, through its battles in the cold war and the war on terror, to its near-collapse after 9/ll.
Tim Weiner?s past work on the CIA and American intelligence was hailed as ?impressively reported? and ?immensely entertaining? in The New York Times.
The Wall Street Journal called it ?truly extraordinary . . . the best book ever written on a case of espionage.? Here is the hidden history of the CIA: why eleven presidents and three generations of CIA officers have been unable to understand the world; why nearly every CIA director has left the agency in worse shape than he found it; and how these failures have profoundly jeopardized our national security.
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