[NYTr] Agency of Rogues: Chalmers Johnson Rvws Tim Weiner's CIA History

[nytr at olm.blythe-systems.com]

sent by MichaelP (activ-l)

TomDispatch - Jul 24, 2007
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174824/chalmers_johnson_agency_of_rogues

Agency of Rogues

Introduction 

[The secret prison was set up on a secure U.S. Naval base outside the
U.S. and so beyond the slightest recourse to legal oversight. It was
there that the CIA clandestinely brought its "suspects" to be
interrogated, abused, and tortured.

That description might indeed sound like Guantanamo 2002, but think again. 
According to New York Times reporter Tim Weiner's new history of the 
Central Intelligence Agency, Legacy of Ashes -- a remarkable treasure 
trove of grim and startling information you hadn't known before -- this 
actually happened first in the Panama Canal Zone in the early 1950s. It 
was there, as well as at two secret prisons located in Germany and Japan, 
the defeated Axis powers (and not, in those days, in Thailand or Rumania), 
that the CIA brought questionable double agents for "secret experiments" 
in harsh interrogation, "using techniques on the edge of torture, 
drug-induced mind control, and brainwashing." This was but a small part of 
"Project Artichoke," a 15-year, multi-billion dollar "search by the CIA 
for ways to control the human mind."

No book in recent memory has done such a superb job of illuminating the 
roiling, disastrous, thoroughly destructive path through history of 
America's top covert-operations agency over the last six decades, what 
Chalmers Johnson has often called "the president's private army." Johnson 
himself was an outside consultant for the CIA from 1967 to 1973 until, as 
he writes in his latest book Nemesis: The Last Days of the American 
Republic (the third volume of his Blowback Trilogy), "this consulting 
function was abolished by [National Security Advisor Henry] Kissinger and 
[CIA Director James] Schlesinger during [President Richard] Nixon's second 
term precisely because they did not want outsiders interfering with their 
ability to tell the president what to think." On first arrival at the 
Agency's "campus" in Langley, Virginia, Johnson reminds us, Schlesinger, 
in the typically highhanded fashion of CIA heads, immediately announced, 
"I am here to see that you guys don't screw Richard Nixon." Think of CIA 
Directors George Tenet or Porter Goss and George Bush and you're back in 
our present age.

As books, Nemesis and Legacy of Ashes complement each other superbly,
so I thought it worthwhile to set Johnson loose on Weiner's new work in
a rare book review for Tomdispatch. Tom]


                                      ***

The Life and Times of the CIA

Wall Street Brokers, Ivy League Professors, Soldiers of Fortune, Ad Men, 
Newsmen, Stunt Men, Second-Story Men, and Con Men on Active Duty for the 
United States

By Chalmers Johnson

This essay is a review of 

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA 
by Tim Weiner 
(Doubleday, 702 pp., $27.95).

The American people may not know it but they have some severe problems 
with one of their official governmental entities, the Central Intelligence 
Agency. Because of the almost total secrecy surrounding its activities and 
the lack of cost accounting on how it spends the money covertly 
appropriated for it within the defense budget, it is impossible for 
citizens to know what the CIA's approximately 17,000 employees do with, or 
for, their share of the yearly $44 billion-$48 billion or more spent on 
"intelligence." This inability to account for anything at the CIA is, 
however, only one problem with the Agency and hardly the most serious one 
either.

There are currently at least two criminal trials underway in Italy and 
Germany against several dozen CIA officials for felonies committed in 
those countries, including kidnapping people with a legal right to be in 
Germany and Italy, illegally transporting them to countries such as Egypt 
and Jordan for torture, and causing them to "disappear" into secret 
foreign or CIA-run prisons outside the U.S. without any form of due 
process of law.

The possibility that CIA funds are simply being ripped off by insiders is 
also acute. The CIA's former number three official, its executive director 
and chief procurement officer, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, is now under federal 
indictment in San Diego for corruptly funneling contracts for water, air 
services, and armored vehicles to a lifelong friend and defense 
contractor, Brent Wilkes, who was unqualified to perform the services 
being sought. In return, Wilkes treated Foggo to thousands of dollars' 
worth of vacation trips and dinners, and promised him a top job at his 
company when he retired from the CIA.

Thirty years ago, in a futile attempt to provide some check on endemic 
misbehavior by the CIA, the administration of Gerald Ford created the 
President's Intelligence Oversight Board. It was to be a civilian watchdog 
over the Agency. A 1981 executive order by President Ronald Reagan made 
the board permanent and gave it the mission of identifying CIA violations 
of the law (while keeping them secret in order not to endanger national 
security). Through five previous administrations, members of the board -- 
all civilians not employed by the government -- actively reported on and 
investigated some of the CIA's most secret operations that seemed to 
breach legal limits.

However, on July 15, 2007, John Solomon of the Washington Post reported 
that, for the first five-and-a-half years of the Bush administration, the 
Intelligence Oversight Board did nothing -- no investigations, no reports, 
no questioning of CIA officials. It evidently found no reason to inquire 
into the interrogation methods Agency operatives employed at secret 
prisons or the transfer of captives to countries that use torture, or 
domestic wiretapping not warranted by a federal court.

Who were the members of this non-oversight board of see-no-evil, 
hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil monkeys? The board now in place is led by 
former Bush economic adviser Stephen Friedman. It includes Don Evans, a 
former commerce secretary and friend of the President, former Admiral 
David Jeremiah, and lawyer Arthur B. Culvahouse. The only thing they 
accomplished was to express their contempt for a legal order by a 
president of the United States.

Corrupt and undemocratic practices by the CIA have prevailed since it was 
created in 1947. However, as citizens we have now, for the first time, 
been given a striking range of critical information necessary to 
understand how this situation came about and why it has been so impossible 
to remedy. We have a long, richly documented history of the CIA from its 
post-World War II origins to its failure to supply even the most 
elementary information about Iraq before the 2003 invasion of that 
country.

DECLASSIFIED CIA RECORDS

Tim Weiner's book, Legacy of Ashes, is important for many reasons, but 
certainly one is that it brings back from the dead the possibility that 
journalism can actually help citizens perform elementary oversight on our 
government. Until Weiner's magnificent effort, I would have agreed with 
Seymour Hersh that, in the current crisis of American governance and 
foreign policy, the failure of the press has been almost complete. Our 
journalists have generally not even tried to penetrate the layers of 
secrecy that the executive branch throws up to ward off scrutiny of its 
often illegal and incompetent activities. This is the first book I've read 
in a long time that documents its very important assertions in a way that 
goes well beyond asking readers merely to trust the reporter.

Weiner, a New York Times correspondent, has been working on Legacy of 
Ashes for 20 years. He has read over 50,000 government documents, mostly 
from the CIA, the White House, and the State Department. He was 
instrumental in causing the CIA Records Search Technology (CREST) program 
of the National Archives to declassify many of them, particularly in 2005 
and 2006. He has read more than 2,000 oral histories of American 
intelligence officers, soldiers, and diplomats and has himself conducted 
more than 300 on-the-record interviews with current and past CIA officers, 
including ten former directors of central intelligence. Truly exceptional 
among authors of books on the CIA, he makes the following claim: "This 
book is on the record -- no anonymous sources, no blind quotations, no 
hearsay."

Weiner's history contains 154 pages of end-notes keyed to comments in the 
text. (Numbered notes and standard scholarly citations would have been 
preferable, as well as an annotated bibliography providing information on 
where documents could be found; but what he has done is still light-years 
ahead of competing works.) These notes contain extensive verbatim 
quotations from documents, interviews, and oral histories. Weiner also 
observes: "The CIA has reneged on pledges made by three consecutive 
directors of central intelligence - [Robert] Gates, [James] Woolsey, and 
[John] Deutch -- to declassify records on nine major covert actions: 
France and Italy in the 1940s and 1950s; North Korea in the 1950s; Iran in 
1953; Indonesia in 1958; Tibet in the 1950s and 1960s; and the Congo, the 
Dominican Republic, and Laos in the 1960s." He is nonetheless able to 
supply key details on each of these operations from unofficial, but fully 
identified, sources.

In May 2003, after a lengthy delay, the government finally released the 
documents on President Dwight D. Eisenhower's engineered regime change in 
Guatemala in 1954; most of the records from the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco in 
which a CIA-created exile army of Cubans went to their deaths or to prison 
in a hapless invasion of that island have been released; and the reports 
on the CIA's 1953 overthrow of Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadeq 
were leaked. Weiner's efforts and his resulting book are monuments to 
serious historical research in our allegedly "open society." Still, he 
warns,

"While I was gathering and obtaining declassification authorization for 
some of the CIA records used in this book at the National Archives, the 
agency [the CIA] was engaged in a secret effort to reclassify many of 
those same records, dating back to the 1940s, flouting the law and 
breaking its word. Nevertheless, the work of historians, archivists, and 
journalists has created a foundation of documents on which a book can be 
built."

SURPRISE ATTACKS

As an idea, if not an actual entity, the Central Intelligence Agency came 
into being as a result of December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked the 
U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor. It functionally came to an end, as Weiner 
makes clear, on September 11, 2001, when operatives of al-Qaeda flew 
hijacked airliners into the World Trade towers in Manhattan and the 
Pentagon in Washington, DC. Both assaults were successful surprise 
attacks.

The Central Intelligence Agency itself was created during the Truman 
administration in order to prevent future surprise attacks like Pearl 
Harbor by uncovering planning for them and so forewarning against them. On 
September 11th, 2001, the CIA was revealed to be a failure precisely 
because it had been unable to discover the al-Qaeda plot and sound the 
alarm against a surprise attack that would prove almost as devastating as 
Pearl Harbor. After 9/11, the Agency, having largely discredited itself, 
went into a steep decline and finished the job. Weiner concludes: "Under 
[CIA Director George Tenet's] leadership, the agency produced the worst 
body of work in its long history: a special national intelligence estimate 
titled Iraq's Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction.'" It is 
axiomatic that, as political leaders lose faith in an intelligence agency 
and quit listening to it, its functional life is over, even if the people 
working there continue to report to their offices.

In December 1941, there was sufficient intelligence on Japanese activities 
for the U.S. to have been much better prepared for a surprise attack. 
Naval Intelligence had cracked Japanese diplomatic and military codes; 
radar stations and patrol flights had been authorized (but not fully 
deployed); and strategic knowledge of Japanese past behaviors and 
capabilities (if not of intentions) was adequate. The FBI had even 
observed the Japanese consul-general in Honolulu burning records in his 
backyard but reported this information only to Director J. Edgar Hoover, 
who did not pass it on.

Lacking was a central office to collate, analyze, and put in suitable form 
for presentation to the president all U.S. government information on an 
important issue. In 1941, there were plenty of signals about what was 
coming, but the U.S. government lacked the organization and expertise to 
distinguish true signals from the background "noise" of day-to-day 
communications. In the 1950s, Roberta Wohlstetter, a strategist for the 
Air Force's think tank, the RAND Corporation, wrote a secret study that 
documented the coordination and communications failings leading up to 
Pearl Harbor. (Entitled Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, it was 
declassified and published by Stanford University Press in 1962.)

THE LEGACY OF THE OSS

The National Security Act of 1947 created the CIA with emphasis on the 
word "central" in its title. The Agency was supposed to become the 
unifying organization that would distill and write up all available 
intelligence, and offer it to political leaders in a manageable form. The 
Act gave the CIA five functions, four of them dealing with the collection, 
coordination, and dissemination of intelligence from open sources as well 
as espionage. It was the fifth function -- lodged in a vaguely worded 
passage that allowed the CIA to "perform such other functions and duties 
related to intelligence affecting the national security as the National 
Security Council may from time to time direct" -- that turned the CIA into 
the personal, secret, unaccountable army of the president.

>From the very beginning, the Agency failed to do what President Truman 
expected of it, turning at once to "cloak-and-dagger" projects that were 
clearly beyond its mandate and only imperfectly integrated into any grand 
strategy of the U.S. government. Weiner stresses that the true author of 
the CIA's clandestine functions was George Kennan, the senior State 
Department authority on the Soviet Union and creator of the idea of 
"containing" the spread of communism rather than going to war with 
("rolling back") the USSR.

Kennan had been alarmed by the ease with which the Soviets were setting up 
satellites in Eastern Europe and he wanted to "fight fire with fire." 
Others joined with him to promote this agenda, above all the veterans of 
the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a unit that, under General William 
J. "Wild Bill" Donovan during World War II, had sent saboteurs behind 
enemy lines, disseminated disinformation and propaganda to mislead Axis 
forces, and tried to recruit resistance fighters in occupied countries.

On September 20, 1945, Truman had abolished the OSS -- a bureaucratic 
victory for the Pentagon, the State Department, and the FBI, all of which 
considered the OSS an upstart organization that impinged on their 
respective jurisdictions. Many of the early leaders of the CIA were OSS 
veterans and devoted themselves to consolidating and entrenching their new 
vehicle for influence in Washington. They also passionately believed that 
they were people with a self-appointed mission of world-shaking importance 
and that, as a result, they were beyond the normal legal restraints placed 
on government officials.

>From its inception the CIA has labored under two contradictory conceptions 
of what it was supposed to be doing, and no president ever succeeded in 
correcting or resolving this situation. Espionage and intelligence 
analysis seek to know the world as it is; covert action seeks to change 
the world, whether it understands it or not. The best CIA exemplar of the 
intelligence-collecting function was Richard Helms, director of central 
intelligence (DCI) from 1966 to 1973 (who died in 2002). The great 
protagonist of cloak-and-dagger work was Frank Wisner, the CIA's director 
of operations from 1948 until the late 1950s when he went insane and, in 
1965, committed suicide. Wisner never had any patience for espionage.

Weiner quotes William Colby, a future DCI (1973-1976), on this subject. 
The separation of the scholars of the research and analysis division from 
the spies of the clandestine service created two cultures within the 
intelligence profession, he said, "separate, unequal, and contemptuous of 
each other." That critique remained true throughout the CIA's first 60 
years.

By 1964, the CIA's clandestine service was consuming close to two-thirds 
of its budget and 90% of the director's time. The Agency gathered under 
one roof Wall Street brokers, Ivy League professors, soldiers of fortune, 
ad men, newsmen, stunt men, second-story men, and con men. They never 
learned to work together -- the ultimate result being a series of failures 
in both intelligence and covert operations. In January 1961, on leaving 
office after two terms, President Eisenhower had already grasped the 
situation fully. "Nothing has changed since Pearl Harbor," he told his 
director of central intelligence, Allen Dulles. "I leave a legacy of ashes 
to my successor." Weiner, of course, draws his title from Eisenhower's 
metaphor. It would only get worse in the years to come.

The historical record is unequivocal. The United States is ham-handed and 
brutal in conceiving and executing clandestine operations, and it is 
simply no good at espionage; its operatives never have enough linguistic 
and cultural knowledge of target countries to recruit spies effectively. 
The CIA also appears to be one of the most easily penetrated espionage 
organizations on the planet. From the beginning, it repeatedly lost its 
assets to double agents.

Typically, in the early 1950s, the Agency dropped millions of dollars 
worth of gold bars, arms, two-way radios, and agents into Poland to 
support what its top officials believed was a powerful Polish underground 
movement against the Soviets. In fact, Soviet agents had wiped out the 
movement years before, turned key people in it into double agents, and 
played the CIA for suckers. As Weiner comments, not only had five years of 
planning, various agents, and millions of dollars "gone down the drain," 
but the "unkindest cut might have been [the Agency's] discovery that the 
Poles had sent a chunk of the CIA's money to the Communist Party of 
Italy." [pp. 67-68]

The story would prove unending. On February 21, 1994, the Agency finally 
discovered and arrested Aldrich Ames, the CIA's chief of 
counterintelligence for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, who had been 
spying for the USSR for seven years and had sent innumerable U.S. agents 
before KGB firing squads. Weiner comments, "The Ames case revealed an 
institutional carelessness that bordered on criminal negligence." [p. 451]

THE SEARCH FOR TECHNOLOGICAL MEANS

Over the years, in order to compensate for these serious inadequacies, the 
CIA turned increasingly to signals intelligence and other technological 
means of spying like U-2 reconnaissance aircraft and satellites. In 1952, 
the top leaders of the CIA created the National Security Agency -- an 
eavesdropping and cryptological unit -- to overcome the Agency's abject 
failure to place any spies in North Korea during the Korean War. The 
Agency debacle at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba led a frustrated Pentagon to 
create its own Defense Intelligence Agency as a check on the military 
amateurism of the CIA's clandestine service officers.

Still, technological means, whether satellite spying or electronic 
eavesdropping, will seldom reveal intentions -- and that is the raison 
d'tre of intelligence estimates. As Haviland Smith, who ran operations 
against the USSR in the 1960s and 1970s, lamented, "The only thing missing 
is -- we don't have anything on Soviet intentions. And I don't know how 
you get that. And that's the charter of the clandestine service [emphasis 
in original, pp. 360-61])."

The actual intelligence collected was just as problematic. On the most 
important annual intelligence estimate throughout the Cold War -- that of 
the Soviet order of battle -- the CIA invariably overstated its size and 
menace. Then, to add insult to injury, under George H. W. Bush's tenure as 
DCI (1976-77), the agency tore itself apart over ill-informed right-wing 
claims that it was actually underestimating Soviet military forces. The 
result was the appointment of "Team B" during the Ford presidency, led by 
Polish exiles and neoconservative fanatics. It was tasked to "correct" the 
work of the Office of National Estimates.

"After the Cold War was over," writes Weiner, "the agency put Team B's 
findings to the test. Every one of them was wrong." [p. 352] But the 
problem was not simply one of the CIA succumbing to political pressure. It 
was also structural: "[F]or thirteen years, from Nixon's era to the dying 
days of the Cold War, every estimate of Soviet strategic nuclear forces 
overstated [emphasis in original] the rate at which Moscow was modernizing 
its weaponry." [p. 297]

>From 1967 to 1973, I served as an outside consultant to the Office of 
National Estimates, one of about a dozen specialists brought in to try to 
overcome the myopia and bureaucratism involved in the writing of these 
national intelligence estimates. I recall agonized debates over how the 
mechanical highlighting of worst-case analyses of Soviet weapons was 
helping to promote the arms race. Some senior intelligence analysts tried 
to resist the pressures of the Air Force and the military-industrial 
complex. Nonetheless, the late John Huizenga, an erudite intelligence 
analyst who headed the Office of National Estimates from 1971 until the 
wholesale purge of the Agency by DCI James Schlesinger in 1973, bluntly 
said to the CIA's historians:

"In retrospect.... I really do not believe that an intelligence 
organization in this government is able to deliver an honest analytical 
product without facing the risk of political contention. . . . I think 
that intelligence has had relatively little impact on the policies that 
we've made over the years. Relatively none. . . . Ideally, what had been 
supposed was that . . . serious intelligence analysis could.... assist the 
policy side to reexamine premises, render policymaking more sophisticated, 
closer to the reality of the world. Those were the large ambitions which I 
think were never realized." [p. 353]

On the clandestine side, the human costs were much higher. The CIA's 
incessant, almost always misguided, attempts to determine how other people 
should govern themselves; its secret support for fascists (e.g., Greece 
under George Papadopoulos), militarists (e.g., Chile under Gen. Augusto 
Pinochet), and murderers (e.g., the Congo under Joseph Mobutu); its 
uncritical support of death squads (El Salvador) and religious fanatics 
(Muslim fundamentalists in Afghanistan) -- all these and more activities 
combined to pepper the world with blowback movements against the United 
States.

Nothing has done more to undercut the reputation of the United States than 
the CIA's "clandestine" (only in terms of the American people) murders of 
the presidents of South Vietnam and the Congo, its ravishing of the 
governments of Iran, Indonesia (three times), South Korea (twice), all of 
the Indochinese states, virtually every government in Latin America, and 
Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The deaths from these armed assaults run 
into the millions. After 9/11, President Bush asked "Why do they hate us?" 
>From Iran (1953) to Iraq (2003), the better question would be, "Who does 
not?"

THE CASH NEXUS

There is a major exception to this portrait of long-term Agency 
incompetence. "One weapon the CIA used with surpassing skill," Weiner 
writes, "was cold cash. The agency excelled at buying the services of 
foreign politicians." [p. 116] It started with the Italian elections of 
April 1948. The CIA did not yet have a secure source of clandestine money 
and had to raise it secretly from Wall Street operators, rich 
Italian-Americans, and others.

"The millions were delivered to Italian politicians and the priests of 
Catholic Action, a political arm of the Vatican. Suitcases filed with cash 
changed hands in the four-star Hassler Hotel. . . . Italy's Christian 
Democrats won by a comfortable margin and formed a government that 
excluded communists. A long romance between the [Christian Democratic] 
party and the agency began. The CIA's practice of purchasing elections and 
politicians with bags of cash was repeated in Italy -- and in many other 
countries -- for the next twenty-five years." [p. 27]

The CIA ultimately spent at least $65 million on Italy's politicians -- 
including "every Christian Democrat who ever won a national election in 
Italy." [p. 298] As the Marshall Plan to reconstruct Europe got up to 
speed in the late 1940s, the CIA secretly skimmed the money it needed from 
Marshall Plan accounts. After the Plan ended, secret funds buried in the 
annual Defense appropriation bill continued to finance the CIA's 
operations.

After Italy, the CIA moved on to Japan, paying to bring Nobusuke Kishi to 
power as Japan's prime minister (in office 1957-1960), the country's World 
War II minister of munitions. It ultimately used its financial muscle to 
entrench the (conservative) Liberal Democratic Party in power and to turn 
Japan into a single-party state, which it remains to this day. The 
cynicism with which the CIA continued to subsidize "democratic" elections 
in Western Europe, Latin America, and East Asia, starting in the late 
1950s, led to disillusionment with the United States and a distinct 
blunting of the idealism with which it had waged the early Cold War.

Another major use for its money was a campaign to bankroll alternatives in 
Western Europe to Soviet-influenced newspapers and books. Attempting to 
influence the attitudes of students and intellectuals, the CIA sponsored 
literary magazines in Germany (Der Monat) and Britain (Encounter), 
promoted abstract expressionism in art as a radical alternative to the 
Soviet Union's socialist realism, and secretly funded the publication and 
distribution of over two and a half million books and periodicals. Weiner 
treats these activities rather cursorily. He should have consulted Frances 
Stonor Saunders' indispensable The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the 
World of Arts and Letters.

HIDING INCOMPETENCE

Despite all this, the CIA was protected from criticism by its impenetrable 
secrecy and by the tireless propaganda efforts of such leaders as Allen W. 
Dulles, director of the Agency under President Eisenhower, and Richard 
Bissell, chief of the clandestine service after Wisner. Even when the CIA 
seemed to fail at everything it undertook, writes Weiner, "The ability to 
represent failure as success was becoming a CIA tradition." [p. 58]

After the Chinese intervention in the Korean War, the CIA dropped 212 
foreign agents into Manchuria. Within a matter of days, 101 had been 
killed and the other 111 captured -- but this information was effectively 
suppressed. The CIA's station chief in Seoul, Albert R. Haney, an 
incompetent army colonel and intelligence fabricator, never suspected that 
the hundreds of agents he claimed to have working for him all reported to 
North Korean control officers.

Haney survived his incredible performance in the Korean War because, at 
the end of his tour in November 1952, he helped to arrange for the 
transportation of a grievously wounded Marine lieutenant back to the 
United States. That Marine turned out to be the son of Allen Dulles, who 
repaid his debt of gratitude by putting Haney in charge of the covert 
operation that -- despite a largely bungled, badly directed secret 
campaign -- did succeed in overthrowing the Guatemalan government of 
President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954. The CIA's handiwork in Guatemala 
ultimately led to the deaths of 200,000 civilians during the 40 years of 
bloodshed and civil war that followed the sabotage of an elected 
government for the sake of the United Fruit Company.

Weiner has made innumerable contributions to many hidden issues of postwar 
foreign policy, some of them still on-going. For example, during the 
debate over America's invasion of Iraq after 2003, one of the constant 
laments was that the CIA did not have access to a single agent inside 
Saddam Hussein's inner circle. That was not true. Ironically, the 
intelligence service of France -- a country U.S. politicians publicly 
lambasted for its failure to support us -- had cultivated Naji Sabri, 
Iraq's foreign minister. Sabri told the French agency, and through it the 
American government, that Saddam Hussein did not have an active nuclear or 
biological weapons program, but the CIA ignored him. Weiner comments 
ruefully, "The CIA had almost no ability to analyze accurately what little 
intelligence it had." [pp. 666-67, n. 487]

Perhaps the most comical of all CIA clandestine activities -- 
unfortunately all too typical of its covert operations over the last 60 
years -- was the spying it did in 1994 on the newly appointed American 
ambassador to Guatemala, Marilyn McAfee, who sought to promote policies of 
human rights and justice in that country. Loyal to the murderous 
Guatemalan intelligence service, the CIA had bugged her bedroom and picked 
up sounds that led their agents to conclude that the ambassador was having 
a lesbian love affair with her secretary, Carol Murphy. The CIA station 
chief "recorded her cooing endearments to Murphy." The agency spread the 
word in Washington that the liberal ambassador was a lesbian without 
realizing that "Murphy" was also the name of her two-year-old black 
standard poodle. The bug in her bedroom had recorded her petting her dog. 
She was actually a married woman from a conservative family. [p. 459]

Back in August 1945, General William Donovan, the head of the OSS, said to 
President Truman, "Prior to the present war, the United States had no 
foreign intelligence service. It never has had and does not now have a 
coordinated intelligence system." Weiner adds, "Tragically, it still does 
not have one." I agree with Weiner's assessment, but based on his truly 
exemplary analysis of the Central Intelligence Agency in Legacy of Ashes, 
I do not think that this is a tragedy. Given his evidence, it is hard to 
believe that the United States would not have been better off if it had 
left intelligence collection and analysis to the State Department and had 
assigned infrequent covert actions to the Pentagon.

I believe that this is where we stand today: The CIA has failed badly, and 
it would be an important step toward a restoration of the checks and 
balances within our political system simply to abolish it. Some observers 
argue that this would be an inadequate remedy because what the government 
now ostentatiously calls the "intelligence community" -- complete with its 
own website -- is composed of 16 discrete and competitive intelligence 
organizations ready to step into the CIA's shoes. This, however, is a 
misunderstanding. Most of the members of the so-called intelligence 
community are bureaucratic appendages of well-established departments or 
belong to extremely technical units whose functions have nothing at all to 
do with either espionage or cloak-and-dagger adventures.

The sixteen entities include the intelligence organizations of each 
military service -- the Air Force, Army, Coast Guard, Marine Corps, Navy, 
and the Defense Intelligence Agency -- and reflect inter-service rivalries 
more than national needs or interests; the departments of Energy, Homeland 
Security, State, Treasury, and Drug Enforcement Administration, as well as 
the FBI and the National Security Agency; and the units devoted to 
satellites and reconnaissance (National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, 
National Reconnaissance Office). The only one of these units that could 
conceivably compete with the CIA is the one that I recommend to replace it 
-- namely, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research 
(INR). Interestingly enough, it had by far the best record of any U.S. 
intelligence entity in analyzing Iraq under Saddam Hussein and estimating 
what was likely to happen if we pursued the Bush administration's 
misconceived scheme of invading his country. Its work was, of course, 
largely ignored by the Bush-Cheney White House.

Weiner does not cover every single aspect of the record of the CIA, but 
his book is one of the best possible places for a serious citizen to begin 
to understand the depths to which our government has sunk. It also brings 
home the lesson that an incompetent or unscrupulous intelligence agency 
can be as great a threat to national security as not having one at all.