Legacy of Ashes
The History of the CIA. With a new Afterword
(Sprache: Englisch)
This book charts the disastrous course of never-revealed secret operations across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. It shows that the CIA's vaunted victories in the cold war - coups that overthrew constitutional leaders in Iran and Guatemala - were...
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This book charts the disastrous course of never-revealed secret operations across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. It shows that the CIA's vaunted victories in the cold war - coups that overthrew constitutional leaders in Iran and Guatemala - were chaotic fights that succeeded only by deadly force. It exposes the buying and selling of the political leaders of world powers. It details how Presidents from Harry Truman to George W. Bush have abused and misused the CIA. It shows how the CIA deteriorated over the decades into an incapable and incoherent service whose deepest secret was its own weakness and ineptitude.
Klappentext zu „Legacy of Ashes “
For the last 60 years, the CIA has managed to maintain a formidable reputation in spite of its terrible record. Now Pulitzer Prize-winning author Weiner offers the first definitive history of the CIA--and everything is on the record.Lese-Probe zu „Legacy of Ashes “
AUTHOR S NOTELegacy of Ashes is the record of the first sixty years of the Central Intelligence Agency. It describes how the most powerful country in the history of Western civilization has failed to create a first-rate spy service. That failure constitutes a danger to the national security of the United States. Intelligence is secret action aimed at understanding or changing what goes on abroad. President Dwight D. Eisenhower called it a distasteful but vital necessity. A nation that wants to project its power beyond its borders needs to see over the horizon, to know what is coming, to prevent attacks against its people. It must anticipate surprise. Without a strong, smart, sharp intelligence service, presidents and generals alike can become blind and crippled. But throughout its history as a superpower, the United States has not had such a service.
History, Edward Gibbon wrote in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, is little more than the register of crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind. The annals of the Central Intelligence Agency are filled with folly and misfortune, along with acts of bravery and cunning. They are replete with fleeting successes and long lasting failures abroad. They are marked by political battles and power struggles at home. The agency s triumphs have saved some blood and treasure. Its mistakes have squandered both. They have proved fatal for legions of American soldiers and foreign agents; some three thousand Americans who died in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001; and three thousand more who have died since then in Iraq and Afghanistan. The one crime of lasting consequence has been the CIA s inability to carry out its central mission: informing the president of what is happening in the world.
The United States had no intelligence to speak of when World War II began, and next to none a few weeks after the war ended. A mad rush to demobilize left behind a few hundred men who had a few
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years experience in the world of secrets and the will to go on fighting a new enemy. All major powers except the United States have had for a long time past permanent worldwide intelligence services, reporting directly to the highest echelons of their Government, General William J. Donovan, the commander of the wartime Office of Strategic Services, warned President Truman in August 1945. Prior to the present war, the United States had no foreign secret intelligence service. It never has had and does not now have a coordinated intelligence system. Tragically, it still does not have one.
The CIA was supposed to become that system. But the blueprint for the agency was a hasty sketch. It was no cure for a chronic American weakness: secrecy and deception were not our strengths. The collapse of the British Empire left the United States as the sole force able to oppose Soviet communism, and America desperately needed to know those enemies, to provide foresight to presidents, and to fight fire with fire when called upon to light the fuse. The mission of the CIA, above all, was to keep the president forewarned against surprise attack, a second Pearl Harbor.
The agency s ranks were filled with thousands of patriotic Americans in the 1950s. Many were brave and battle hardened. Some had wisdom. Few really knew the enemy. Where understanding failed, presidents ordered the CIA to change the course of history through covert action. The conduct of political and psychological warfare in peacetime was a new art, wrote Gerald Miller, then the CIA s covert operations chief for Western Europe. Some of the techniques were known but doctrine and experience were lacking. The CIA s covert operations were by and large blind stabs in the dark. The agency s only course was to learn by doing by makin
The CIA was supposed to become that system. But the blueprint for the agency was a hasty sketch. It was no cure for a chronic American weakness: secrecy and deception were not our strengths. The collapse of the British Empire left the United States as the sole force able to oppose Soviet communism, and America desperately needed to know those enemies, to provide foresight to presidents, and to fight fire with fire when called upon to light the fuse. The mission of the CIA, above all, was to keep the president forewarned against surprise attack, a second Pearl Harbor.
The agency s ranks were filled with thousands of patriotic Americans in the 1950s. Many were brave and battle hardened. Some had wisdom. Few really knew the enemy. Where understanding failed, presidents ordered the CIA to change the course of history through covert action. The conduct of political and psychological warfare in peacetime was a new art, wrote Gerald Miller, then the CIA s covert operations chief for Western Europe. Some of the techniques were known but doctrine and experience were lacking. The CIA s covert operations were by and large blind stabs in the dark. The agency s only course was to learn by doing by makin
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Autoren-Porträt von Tim Weiner
Tim Weiner
Bibliographische Angaben
- Autor: Tim Weiner
- 2008, 848 Seiten, 8 Schwarz-Weiss-Abbildungen, Masse: 13,3 x 20,3 cm, Kartoniert (TB), Englisch
- Verlag: VINTAGE
- ISBN-10: 0307389006
- ISBN-13: 9780307389008
- Erscheinungsdatum: 20.05.2008
Sprache:
Englisch
Pressezitat
"Must reading for anyone interested in the CIA or American intelligence since World War II." The Washington Post Legacy of Ashes is the best book I've yet read on the CIA's covert actions." Edward Jay Epstein, The Wall Street Journal"Legacy of Ashes should be must-reading for every presidential candidate and every American who wants to understand why the nation repeatedly stumbles into one disaster abroad after another. The Boston Globe A timely and vital contribution . . . [that] glitters with relevance. Los Angeles Times This is by far the scariest book of the year. The Christian Science Monitor
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