Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (review)

Anyone entering college in the late 1940s, just after the Central Intelligence Agency's official creation, with a determination to become a budding political scientist might have encountered two classes on their schedule with somewhat different perspectives about America's future role in the history of Western civilization. More than likely, instructors for these courses were veterans of the Second World War and grateful recipients of the GI Bill of Rights who had only recently acquired their doctorates.

On the one hand, a course in American democracy probably expressed an optimistic worldview born out of victory against fascism and rooted in ideals of individual rights and a new international organization, the United Nations, that promised yet another springtime of peoples and nations breaking out of their colonial bonds.

On the other hand, a course in international relations, while paying homage to a basic faith in democracy, would more than likely have focused on a gloomier view of America in the world, one rather severely bounded by the realities of power politics and the clash between the only two giants left standing after Nazi Germany's and Japan's unconditional capitulations to Allied military might. Surely the CIA became a major player in this dreary landscape.

Although the United States had not been without its idealists and realists in world affairs before 1945, it had never really framed its foreign policy between these two poles because it had never been subjected to the kind of shock produced by Pearl Harbor and its violent aftermath. Today this same America lives in another such zone of indeterminacy between idealism and realism after 9/11.

Created in 1947 by the same National Security Act that brought into existence a new air force as a separate service and the National Security Council (NSC) for coordinating foreign and defense policy for presidential decisions, the CIA was born, in the words of New York Times reporter Tim Weiner in his new book, Legacy of Ashes, "with crippling defects," among which was that the legislation said nothing specific about secret operations overseas. Instead it instructed the CIA to correlate, evaluate, and disseminate intelligence and to perform "other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security" (Weiner's quotation from the act). In these eleven words, the proponents in the US government for covert action, still under great suspicion by President Harry S. Truman, had created a "loophole" (Weiner) for what followed in the policies of every American presidency since, including Truman's: hundreds of major (and minor) covert actions by the CIA's clandestine service. Needless to say, the founders and administrators of these actions—led by every director of central intelligence to the present day—claimed power realism as their view of international relations in the darkest sense of this school of thought. A Soviet menace threatened the very foundations of Western civilization.

Weiner chronicles the entire history of the CIA's covert operations from Truman to George W. Bush within the parameters of the specific—and less specific—language of the 1947 National Security Act, and the controversies among intelligence professionals and their political patrons over what became disproportionate CIA concentration on covert action (the law's loophole) as contrasted with its more specific clandestine espionage functions. In these circles no starry-eyed idealists could survive in either school, the problem always one of pragmatic results.

Early in the postwar years, Weiner notes, the joint chiefs of staff and the forceful James V. Forrestal, among others, feared a Soviet seizure of all Europe, with the intelligence community split into two camps on this threat: "One believed in the slow and patient gathering of secret intelligence through espionage [the group to which Richard Helms belonged]. . . . [T]he other believed in secret warfare—taking the battle to the enemy through covert action [Frank Wisner the leader]." Beginning with a siphoning off funds from the Marshall Plan, the latter side prevailed and has maintained its ascendancy...