Link: They All Fall Down – New Essay
They All Fall Down
In a recent essay about changing mainstream attitudes towards Edward Snowden and the national security state, I talked a little bit how the business of recording and analyzing history is riddled with class-based structural barriers that largely serve to protect and support establishment power and as such, elite capital. Obviously where I deal with this most in my writing is in the real-time record of history reported and analyzed by the media – after all, this type of orthodox, pro-establishment propagandizing happens every day on the evening news.
Today I’m going to switch gears and talk about books, specifically actual history books about war, foreign policy and espionage. After finishing Edward Snowden’s new biography “Permanent Record” I went back to my shelf and pulled down Tim Weiner’s 2007 book “Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA” – a volume I’ve reference many times in my writing but have never sat down to read from cover to cover until a couple of days ago.
While this isn’t exactly a normal book review, I like to note up front that I’m not here to explicitly trash Legacy of Ashes – it’s not like Weiner’s tome is an objectively bad or horrifyingly inaccurate history book; it did after all win a Pulitzer Prize.
Based on hundreds of direct interviews and massive hordes of (then) recently declassified documents, Legacy of Ashes is mostly what it purports to be – a complete history of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency from its formation up until roughly 2006. Obviously different scholars have different primary sources but if you’re in mainstream liberal media or military scholarship and you write about national security, this is a book you’ll be expected by most informed observers to be familiar with; as I said, I’ve referenced it quite often in my work as well.
Of course, in light of the fact that the book was released right around the same time as the full exposure of CIA’s staggering failure in the lead up to and aftermath of 9/11 and its complicity in Bush’s secret prisons hiding America’s torture program, the author understandably takes an overall “dim” view of the CIA. From cowboy covert operations in the fifties and sixties, up on through to the horrifying failures that lead to the invasion of Iraq in search of weapons of mass destruction our government knew they couldn’t find (because they didn’t exist), Legacy of Ashes tells the tale of a wayward, out of control intelligence agency that has never been capable of its supposed primary function – keeping the President informed of what is happening beyond America’s borders.
In the general sense then, it’s fair to say that for the average reader the book almost certainly comes off as a shocking indictment of the Central Intelligence Agency and many of the men who have had leadership roles inside the agency – so what’s the problem? It almost sounds like I’m recommending it – doesn’t it?
Unfortunately however Tim Weiner is an affluent former New York Times journalist with a Journalism degree from Colombia and a career’s worth of contact with minions of the national security state; in other words Weiner is about as “establishment” as they come and the effect that has on both his overall worldview and his study of the CIA’s history, screams off virtually every single page in Legacy of Ashes.
Like all too many national security “muckrakers” Weiner starts with the basic hypothesis that the CIA and U.S. intelligence agencies in general are good, justified and necessary for the defense of the country – the whole mom and apple pie American feel good story. The repeated abuses and failures of the agency, from the author’s perspective, are simply an obvious byproduct of the arrogance, incompetence and personal failings of individual leaders – failings that are often magnified by the byzantine bureaucratic structures inherent to a “free” and “open liberal democracy” like the United States.
In Weiner’s account the CIA itself is not the problem, but rather the faulty individuals entrusted with its sacred task. Catastrophic failures in intelligence that have all too tragic consequences are a result of individual hubris, mission drift and plain old American cultural arrogance; the question of whether or not there should have even been a Cold War for example, simply doesn’t come up – even as the author openly admits that everything the CIA and the US government thought it knew about the Soviet Union turned out to be wrong and was based on lies produced to order by, yes the CIA. Leader after leader and planner after planner are revealed to be flawed human beings consumed by petty emotions or false assumptions and thus wholly unsuited for the job. Every U.S. president is a poor helpless dupe, grasping to extend his power to protect America from harm without realizing what he’s now empowered the wayward CIA, lead by “the wrong men”, to do next – even as those same men continually empower the CIA to do more and more damage in the “service” of protecting American interests abroad. In this worldview American “cloak and dagger” imperialism comes off as a sort of tragic accident; rather than a purposeful activity designed to bolster American power not just in a military sense, but in a global economic sense on behalf of American corporations as well.
In particular, Weiner’s curious assessment of Allen Dulles as a bumbling incompetent obsessed with reckless covert military actions and derisive of the CIA’s real work, gathering intelligence, paints a very different and somehow less harmful picture of the former CIA director than previously released accounts that delve deeper into the control Dulles exhibited over American media and the ruthlessness with which he marched men to their deaths in the dubious service of the Cold War on communism. While anyone who has read Dave Talbot’s “The Devil’s Chessboard” will have no real problem accepting that Allen Dulles was an unhinged psychopath whose vision was clouded by myopic hatred of the Soviet Union (and anti-capitalism as a whole), Weiner’s portrait of a gout-ridden dilettante withdrawing into a world of public relations and spy-novel trickery doesn’t line up very well with Dulles’s staggering level of (malignant and xenophobic) influence over multiple U.S. presidents and American foreign policy. We are after all talking about a man who might have had a hand in assassinating an American head of state to not only save the CIA but also prolong the Cold War in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Another good example of how the author’s proximity to his subject influences the way he presents the history of the CIA can be found in the way Weiner’s suggestive prose repeatedly implies, but does not directly state, that Fidel Castro killed John F Kennedy; an extremely unlikely if not almost impossible scenario in light of the secret peace talks the Kennedy administration has since been revealed to have been trying to conduct with both Castro and Nikita Khrushchev.
It would be one thing if Weiner were just repeating information from CIA interviewees who believed Castro had Kennedy assassinated, but the problem is that Weiner himself is clearly purposely leaving a trail of clues towards his own belief that Fidel Castro had John F. Kennedy killed in retaliation for the CIA’s botched plots to assassinate Castro; clues that are scattered throughout the entire book – it comes up at least a dozen times in the first 250 pages for example.
Naturally this theory has the benefit of not only indirectly absolving the CIA itself (and shifting the blame to Robert Kennedy) but also supporting the author’s primary thesis – namely that the CIA is horribly run and has at times been completely out of control but ultimately the agency is worth salvaging; a position that undoubtedly makes Weiner’s ex-CIA friends and sources happy no matter how much they protest otherwise.
In the author’s worldview, even the existence of the CIA is an unfortunate compromise for the pure as snow “democratic” Pig Empire, a result of America’s desperate need to fight the more talented, sophisticated and ruthless Soviet intelligence machine – an admission of inferiority that may seem scandalous on its face, but likely serves the CIA and its efforts to obscure the real, decidedly imperialist purpose of the agency just fine on the whole. Weiner could have and quite probably should have named the book “Legacy of Ashes: Confessions of the real CIA” or something similar because this feels like a confessional, or perhaps national therapy more than it feels like excoriation and condemnation.
Legacy of Ashes uses the agency’s own records and officers to gleefully point out all of the CIA’s already admitted mistakes, but the larger questions of how and why the world’s only superpower keeps letting dangerous cowboy intelligence officials “lead it” by the nose into “accidental” atrocity after “accidental” atrocity is left wholly unasked and unanswered. In the end you’re left with a book that largely consists of a full and detailed chronicle of the CIA’s known public history from the perspective of an exasperated but ultimately sympathetic parent who just wishes the agency would stick with the important work of gathering intelligence.
So that simply leaves one question; did Tim Weiner sit down to write a limited hangout for the CIA at the time of its greatest need? I can’t definitively answer that question but truthfully, I doubt it. The lens through which Legacy of Ashes views the CIA seems to me wholly a product of who the author is, or rather who he’d simply have to be to end up a world renowned national security reporter for the New York Times; an influential media figure with the resources, time and gravitas to speak to hundreds of former CIA employees.
Weiner comes from a lived experience and professional environment where American imperialism is a dirty foreign smear, the CIA’s purpose is purely defensive and questioning whether or not the problem is American global hegemony itself, as opposed to rogue cowboys running an unsupervised spy shop, is strictly verboten. If the author were the kind of guy who thought the CIA deserved to be shattered into a thousand pieces and American imperialism is a source of global suffering, not global stability – well I highly doubt you’d have ever heard of his book.
All of which isn’t to say that Legacy of Ashes is a worthless book; if like myself you’ve read dozens and dozens of other books on not only the CIA but also U.S. imperialism, it’s fairly easy to tease out the facts from Weiner’s strictly liberal orthodox opinions and desire to ultimately preserve the agency. Unfortunately however if you are not an accomplished history student or largely unfamiliar with the minutiae of CIA’s history as a whole, it’s safe to say that Legacy of Ashes is only going to tell you part of the story – the what, and not the why.
This is because if you ever did figure out the real reasons why, you’d see no justifiable reason for America to even have a CIA.
– nina illingworth
