The Agency Defends Its Legacy

The CIA has repeatedly taken bullets it to protect both those it serves, ongoing operations and its own code of silence.  It's taken blame for 9/11 despite the CIA Counterterrorist Center's Chief Cofer Black's urgent and repeated warnings that bin Laden was poised to strike in the US.  It's been criticized for prewar intelligence failures in Iraq, even though the intelligence coming up through the Agency was accurate and its predictions about the postwar challenges were chillingly accurate. The Agency rarely sets the record straight and that's part of what makes it such an easy target for public criticism.  On Monday, it broke the silence and issued a statement about the inaccuracies of a recent book, Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes, that claims to be "the definitive history of the CIA."

I have only read the last few pages of Legacy of Ashes which are about the current situation facing the CIA and outsourcing.  If the rest of the book is like those pages, there is good reason that the CIA needed to speak up and that everyone should listen.

I had a couple of discussions with Mr. Weiner about the topic of those pages.  I hesitate before making any portion of a private conversation public, but in this case Mr. Weiner's thoughts from that conversation are already public in his book.

One of the conversations with Mr. Weiner was in April of this year before he was in the final pass of the galleys when changes could still be made on his manuscript.  In that phone call, Mr. Weiner expressed to me his disgust of how people who had served the public interest for so long would leave the CIA so that he could get rich as an intel contractor during a time the Agency needed him the most to help track down al Qaeda.  He singled out Cofer Black as an example of this.  I stopped him, backed up the conversation and corrected him--Cofer Black didn't leave the Agency for personal reasons--most definitely not because of a lack of dedication to public service--but rather he was forced out by Rumsfeld because of his criticism of the Pentagon.  I urged Mr. Weiner to look into it more closely. 

I heard the same accusations about Mr. Black repeated again by Mr. Weiner in a later conversation in June.  He clearly hadn't done the background fact-checking that I would expect from a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist.  I was even more shocked to see a version of these unfounded claims in print in the pages of Legacy of Ashes.  In this case, Mr. Weiner's accusations about Cofer Black do not match known facts that I had personally made Mr. Weiner aware of this at a time when he could have corrected the book--had he been interested in creating an unbiased history of the CIA.  Clearly, that was not his objective.

 

Ironically, I usually find myself a critic of the Agency, but I am deeply committed to truth in whatever  dark corners where it may be found, even the CIA's Public Affairs Office:

 

CIA Statement on “Legacy of Ashes”

August 6, 2007 

---

 

The CIA is no stranger to criticism. Intelligence work, focused as it is on the uncertain, the unknown, and the deliberately hidden, comes with great difficulty and risk. There will be shortcomings and unpleasant surprises. That said, Tim Weiner’s recently published book, Legacy of Ashes, paints far too dark a picture of the agency’s past. Backed by selective citations, sweeping assertions, and a fascination with the negative, Weiner overlooks, minimizes, or distorts agency achievements. 

In 1948, the CIA accurately assessed the chances of war with the Soviets as nil. According to Weiner, that was a failure “because no one listened.” The development of the U-2 spyplane was a stunning technological achievement that offered a unique look behind the Iron Curtain. To Weiner, it is tied to failure, because the CIA should have had better human sources inside the Soviet Union. Through analytic rigor, the agency made a near-perfect forecast of the 1967 Mideast War. Weiner attributes it wholly to information from a foreign intelligence service. The CIA offered accurate and timely warning of Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, a fact Weiner obscures in his narrative. 

Those are but a few examples. The story of Pyotr Popov, the CIA’s first major Soviet spy, gets very short shrift. Weiner rightly speaks of the Soviet sources killed by the treachery of Aldrich Ames, yet never mentions the skill it took to recruit those sources or the intelligence they provided the United States. Time and again, Weiner takes things to the darkest corner of the room. He knows better. In promoting his book, he says the design and deployment of intelligence satellites and the study of imagery from them “helped keep the Cold War cold.” That in itself was no minor achievement. 

Despite its claims to be “the” history of the CIA, the book is marked by errors great and small. Here is a relatively brief, and admittedly incomplete, catalogue: 

• The book’s first few paragraphs mistakenly assert that President Harry Truman never wanted the CIA to engage in covert action. But he signed National Security Council (NSC) directives assigning responsibility for covert action to the CIA—at a time when CIA officials were skeptical about taking on this mission. Weiner himself notes in the book that Truman’s NSC approved 81 covert CIA actions.

• The book points out that covert actions are undertaken at the behest of the President to achieve specific ends at specific times. To Weiner, those objectives are illegitimate, to be viewed solely through the prism of events decades later, as though you can draw a simple, straight, decisive line of causation through years of complicated history.

• The book states that a 1952 operation in Manchuria undertaken by two CIA officers, Dick Fecteau and Jack Downey, was a personnel rescue mission. In fact, the purpose of the operation was to recover documents.

• The book charges that Frank Wisner, a pioneer of the agency’s covert operations, successfully resisted Director of Central Intelligence Walter Bedell Smith’s order to cancel ineffective ones. But a major Asian program was shut down in 1953—on Wisner’s watch as the head of CIA’s covert operations.

• The book states that the National Security Agency (NSA) was created in response to an interception and decryption program that was compromised in 1949. In fact, the NSA was established in 1952 to correct serious problems with military signals intelligence during the Korean War.

• The book alleges that the CIA used Radio Free Europe to spark the 1956 Hungarian uprising. But Weiner’s main source for this idea is a Radio Free Europe memo that was written after the uprising.

• The book suggests that the CIA didn’t predict the collapse of the Soviet Union. As a number of prominent outside observers have noted, the agency had warned of trouble signs in the Soviet Union on regular occasions since the 1970s.

• The book states that current CIA Director Michael Hayden is the first active duty military officer to lead the agency since Walter Bedell Smith in the 1950s. But Stansfield Turner was an active duty admiral in the U.S. Navy during the first two years of his tenure as Director of Central Intelligence.

Even Weiner’s telling of his juiciest tale, involving the American ambassador to Guatemala, is gravely flawed. There is much less to this than Weiner suggests—for starters, the supposed intelligence on which it is based did not even come from the CIA or a CIA source. As is so often the case, there is more than one side to the story. But you would not know that from Weiner’s book. 

What of the CIA today? This is the agency that did much to oust the Taliban from Afghanistan after 9/11 and collapse the Al-Qa’ida safe haven there. This is the agency that unraveled the A.Q. Khan proliferation network and learned enough about Libya’s nuclear program to persuade Tripoli to step back from it. And the agency that has helped foil terrorist plots and erode the structure and leadership of a terrorist movement that is extremely dangerous and highly adaptable. Weiner’s verdict: These skilled and dedicated officers are “the weakest cadre of spies and analysts in the history of the CIA.” 

The agency makes no claims to perfection—far from it. We strive each day to learn from our successes and failures. Not even Weiner can claim that the CIA shrinks from its past. The huge volume of material we have declassified, rare for an intelligence service, underscores the point. With a strong range of sources, Tim Weiner had an opportunity to write a balanced history of a complex, important subject. But he did not. His bias overwhelms his scholarship. One cannot learn the true story of the CIA from Legacy of Ashes.

Comments

[Jay]

This is a very interesting development. I heard an NPR interview with Weiner about his book, and although the CIA comes in for serious criticism, he doesn't cite it as the root of all evil, but rather presidential prerogatives leading to abuse of the CIA and its people, giving it tasks that it wasn't intended to accomplish.

The Public Affairs Office's response is notable also--as in everything the CIA does, they seem to value accuracy, especially so when someone's drawing a bead on their bureaucracy. But as we all know, a bureaucracy's first order of business is always self-perpetuation. I wonder, would the PAO have fact-checked and commented on Weiner's book pre-publication, for accuracy's sake? Is there a precedent?

[J.]

Dick Destiny has an interesting post on Cofer Black, specifically how he is Mitt Romney's national security advisor and media pundit. You might be interested in it.

[Retired]

It would be nice, just once, to read something written by someone who had actually worked with Cofer and knew him on a personal basis. All I've read so far, from Weiner, Dick Destiny and Susskind, among others who've never met Black, is cherry-picked vignettes strung together in no particular order so as portray him as someone who left government service willingly for profit. This cherry-picking technique, by the way, was earlier perfected by Doug Feith, and is what got us into our current situation in the first place. How ironic that Feith, Weiner, Susskind and Dick Destiny all use the same technique to get what they want.

I worked with Cofer. This is the guy that went across the river to the White House prior to 9/11 and warned Condi that something was about to happen and that we'd better mobilize and focus our intel and security resources to thwart an attack. It's also the guy who post-9/11 so pissed off SecDef Rumsfeld by being in the right place at the right time, the proverbial "firstest with the mostest", before Rummy knew about it that Donny pushed every bureaucratic button that he knew in order to get rid of him.

So after having his badge pulled and being heaved unceremoniously out the front door of Hqs, what was the guy who actually captured the world's most notorious terrorist and handed the scumball over for trial and an eventual life sentence several years earlier supposed to do? If he were Weiner or Susskind, he write a whiney expose. Cofer being Cofer, he did the best he could to serve in whatever capacity he was able.

Had he performed less brilliantly and more bureaucratically during his career at CIA, Cofer probably would've been D/NCS today. His biggest career flaw was that he believed in mission first and usually that left little time for politicaly correct pandering.

I would invite those who have actually worked with Cofer to respond. If your knowledge of him is limited to what you've read in books or seen on TV or in the blogosphere, spare us all, go see the latest Bourne offering, and believe that you have figured out what makes Cofer tick.

[Greaseman]

"Legacy of Ashes" is proof that once you win a Pulitzer, you get at least one subsequent pass from publishers on accuracy and relevance in a work of non-fiction.

If we had a choice, we would prefer to have more staffers, with all of the attendant difficulty and responsibility, because we know that this is best for the mid to long term health of the NCS. Since Congress in its wisdom has chosen the easier political course and inundated us with dollars that can only be spent on contractors, we use contractors to accomplish our near term mission and hope that our betters come to their senses in due course.

Weiner has missed all of this, along with a boatload of historical successes that he apparently thinks will just disappear if he doesn't mention them in his book.

Fortunately, there are serious scholars and students of CIA that look at both success and failure, the good as well as the bad. If Weiner is offering "Legacy of Ashes" as his application to join this distinguished group, I hope that he isn't too disappointed when he receives his rejection slip.

[Tony Foresta]

I have yet to read the book, but it sounds like one of tbose "slime the CIA and blame them for all the Bush government failures, abuses, and act of malfeasance and incompetence. More critical is the nature of our - the peoples - intelligence apparatus, and particularly the intelligence product.

If we are getting good intel, - then all is well in the land of OZ. If not - then we are subjected to conjured and concocted threat matrixes, that just happen to benefit the wanton profiteers in the Bush government, - then our future far less secure, and probably far less posperous.

America once had a intelligence apparatus, flawed though it may have been, working on securing and defending America.

Now we have corporations or other business structures dictating what our intelligence is and should be, - FOR PROFIT.

Intelligence is second to profit.

This vector doommed to calamity calamity.

[Jay]

Guess what's in my left hand?

Speaking as one with his nose to the window, it's easy for those-in-the-know to dismiss the efforts of writers such as Weiner, who can write only from what they can legitimately gather in the open source arena. He's come in for some criticism here--and elsewhere--and probably for good reason. And there are those who could write more authoritatively about intelligence, but this presents the chicken-and-egg problem in that they are unable to do so. Those who can write about it, with varying degrees of success, often misread what's out there, but only because they don't have that extra 10 percent that clarifies everything. Writers like Weiner also have foibles and overlook, say, success stories that a pro might think were noteworthy. But that's their take. As they say in the book business, if you don't like it, write your own book!

Then get it past the PRB.

The public has an interest in understanding how the IC works and what is happening. The more sophisticated among them know it's not like James Bond. But it doesn't seem fair to criticize them for not knowing that which is deliberately--and most often legitimately--withheld from them.

[kelley b.]

When war becomes a business, intelligence serves the bottom line.

The CIA is seeing the natural result of the embrace of the dark side. If you sow the wind, you reap the whirlwind. Some individuals- say, Poppy Bush- in the CIA appear to have had the idea 30 years ago or more they could use private corporations to propagate their own agendas. They've been building their own Companies ever since.

Now these Companies aren't the CIA, and these individuals certainly aren't the CIA, but here's the rub: they think they are.

My genuine sympathy goes to those public servants who realize the depth of the water we're swimming in, and the size of the fish whose fins are cutting the water around us.

But what do my sympathies count? I'm a private citizen, a geek with a glimmer of vision on an issue I can not begin to understand because I do not have the full information. But there lies the problem.

This issue can not be addressed until a majority of American citizens want it fixed, but most Americans don't see the problem, much less agree on its solution.

[Tony Foresta]

Word kelly b.. My understanding, conspiratorial though it may be, it that the CIA and the entire US intelligence apparatus is actually two mutually exclive factions. One is working to secure America, - the other is fascist and working the fatten the offsheet accounts of certain fascists who have visited upon America over the years, but are now securely ensconsed in the Bush government.

These two factions are engaged in mortal combat for control of the intelligence apparatus, and the 60bn someodd blackworld budgets.

Tragically, the darkside is winning, and the fascists are working like demons to ceal the tomb.

[Bryan]

As a former HUMINTer, I would like to add that the CIA should be less concerned with correcting perceived inaccuracies and more concerned with not involving itself in situations where it has to defend itself anyway. Even after 9/11, the system -- as well as those including the FBI, DIA, et al -- is still broken; we are safe not because we haven't been attacked, but because they haven't tried. What with the continued in-fighting and internal state of disrepair, it's a wonder we can protect anything anymore. Plus, with the alarming deluge of private contractors, its a wonder loyalty is such in a muddled state and nothing goes right.

[Tony Foresta]

And you and I know August 13, 2007 that they "Al Quaida", - or excuse me while I laugh my ass off - but the "evildoers" are planning to attack us again when their damn good and ready. Al Quaida is the certain proof of the Bush governments incompetence or perhaps complicity. Every office, agency, organization, and individual in the US government was defeated on 9/11 by 19 jihadist massmurderers, (15 of them Saudi) backed, directly and indirectly financed by elements in the lybrinthine corridors of the House of Saud, and malignancy of wahabism practiced and proselytized by the shaitans masked and imams in Saudi Arabia.

Oil aside, Saudi Arabia in not our friend!!! If there is any real intel, - (and I trust and hope there is) eventually, comewhatmay, nomatterwhat, America must confront Saudi Arabia. The rest of this horrorshow and costly bloody TV spectacle is nightmarish Kabuki theater. Well,... there is the wanton profiteering>

[Porter]

Ms R. J. Hillhouse! My hat is off to you! Thank you so very much for your insightful, truthful comments on the shortcomings of Tim Weiner's "Legacy of Ashes". During my 26 year career in the intelligence business I was involved in a few of the "ashes" depicted by Weiner as failures. It's easy from the prospective of history to criticize and I really do not have a problem with that. I am often a Monday morning quarterback myself. But Weiner was off base on many things that are so well documented in the public record through Congressional hearings or document disclosures. Thanks for taking him to task!

I am so pleased by the CIA's public comments on the book as well. I was never a fan of the old policy of neither confirm nor deny. While the Company is not by any means a "public" organization and is answerable only to the President and to Congressional oversight, an informed public makes political decisions on public policy issues. If the public is only informed by books like Legacy, then they are ill-informed and we as a country will suffer because of it.