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Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
by: Tim Weiner

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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 327.1273009
EAN: 9780307389008
ISBN: 0307389006
Label: Anchor
Manufacturer: Anchor
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 848
Publication Date: May 20, 2008
Publisher: Anchor
Release Date: May 20, 2008
Sales Rank: 1726
Studio: Anchor

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Editorial Review:

Product Description:
With shocking revelations that made headlines in papers across the country, Pulitzer-Prize-winner Tim Weiner gets at the truth behind the CIA and uncovers here why nearly every CIA Director has left the agency in worse shape than when he found it; and how these profound failures jeopardize our national security.

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- A Wealth of information
This book is extremely well-written and includes a wealth of previously unknown information. Basically it starts with the creation of the CIA and continues to the present. It provides details that pretty well shows how the leaders of the CIA operated mostly on what they believed was wanted of the CIA versus what was actually wanted. And, in many cases, the CIA operated on only what it's leaders wanted. I am completely amazed at the intricacy of operations between our Government and other countries.

Rating:

- The Unofficial Version of Official CIA History, told Unofficially
For those of us who have followed the 60 years of CIA missteps, errors and failures, serially, this heavy-handed tome of a book offered up unofficially as "official CIA defense of its failures" has to be a big disappointment. For although it admits to failures at every turn, it does so in a clinically neat and minimalist way that glosses over every single caper, and in a way that guarantees that this, the details of the CIA's official admissions of guilt, have already been uncovered and better told elsewhere. In short, this is not the "Come to Jesus" version of CIA history that we were all looking for but the "forced admission" version that has actually come about only after everyone of the Agency failed capers have consistently been exposed elsewhere.

This is the sanctioned, authorized and official version of guilt, "told minimally and unofficially."

In this sense, it is more akin to ... Read More

Rating:

- History of a newspaper that kills
The author begins the book by saying that all Harry Truman wanted was a newspaper. If the author's history as outlined in this book is to be believed, what Truman and his predecessors eventually got was an organization that could be described as a superposition of incompetence and savagery. With each passing paragraph the reader is introduced to an organization that fancied itself above the law and indulged itself in every manner of vile actions, many of them going completely beyond the pale of acceptable moral conduct. But apparently the CIA believed that morality was impractical, and that for the United States to "survive in the real world" one must dispense with morality and act in a manner that is similar, if not identical, to the conduct of one's "enemies."

The author's narrative is informal and sometimes reads as an action story, and those readers who need more details, even after reading such ... Read More

Rating:

- Useful
Written by an experienced journalist, Legacy of Ashes is simultaneously a serious effort at a compreshensive narrative of the CIA's history and a scathing indictment of the agency's performance. Weiner's account is based on analysis of an extensive amount of documenation, including once classified CIA internal histories, and a large number of interviews of former CIA personnel, including several former Directors. Organized chronologically in a series of short chapters, Weiner traces the Agency's vissicitudes from its inception into the post 9/11 period.
Like many other National Security insitutions, the CIA was improvised at the onset of the Cold War. Its impetus came from Truman's need for reliable intelligence about the Soviets. What emerged, however, was qutie different from what Truman desired and contained systemic flaws that would haunt the CIA througout its history. While Truman wanted an intelligence ... Read More

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