| Legacy of
Ashes: The History of the CIA
By
Tim Weiner
With
fanfare, the CIA recently released a set of internal reports
describing such supposed skeletons in its closet as Castro-
assassination attempts, illegal break-ins and mind-altering
drug experiments on unwitting subjects. As it happens, such
“family jewels,” as they are known, had been released (or
leaked) in the mid-1970s: first to the Rockefeller Commission,
then to the Senate's Church Committee (which issued some
14 reports based on them) and then to the House Select Committee
on Intelligence. Despite three decades of familiarity, such
unsecret secrets again made headlines around the world.
The
unwarranted and hyperbolic response to the CIA's new “openness”
only underscores how little the public and press really
know about the CIA. Fortunately, Tim Weiner's prodigiously
researched “Legacy of Ashes” fills in the gaps. Mr. Weiner,
a Pulitzer Prize- winning reporter for the New York Times,
lays out the agency's 60 years of operation, unearthing
many newly declassified reports—and details exactly where
he found them. He has written a powerful exposé of
a secret arm of the American government without using anonymous
sources, off-the-record interviews or blind quotes. “Legacy
of Ashes” is the best book I've yet read on the CIA's covert
actions.
When
the Central Intelligence Agency was officially created after
World War II, its supreme mission, Mr. Weiner notes, was
“to steal Soviet secrets”—that is, to practice espionage.
Of course espionage is no minor matter. It requires building
an organization that can approach foreign officials clandestinely
and persuade them to betray their government's most prized
secrets—usually in document form. Espionage also means manipulating
the careers of such officials so that they can gain access
to the documents that are needed and pass them along undetected.
The CIA itself thus required an environment of absolute
secrecy. The National Security Act of 1947, authorizing
the agency, created exactly such an environment.
But
once presidents had at their disposal an entity armored
by secrecy, they began using it to hide covert actions,
including paramilitary operations, that had nothing to do
with espionage. Soon enough the CIA become the home for
an assortment of executive actions, including coups d'état,
assassination attempts, election-fixing and sabotage. Hence
those “family jewels,” at one time zealously protected.
It
is Mr. Weiner's thesis that housing two such different activities
under the same roof—espionage and covert action—led to a
confusion of the agency's purpose and a shifting of its
attention: Over time, the CIA became obsessively concerned
with covert action and neglected its (crucial) espionage
mission. Mr. Weiner concludes that “the CIA never possessed
a single spy] who had deep insight into the workings of
the Kremlin.” In nearly a half-century of work, he says,
the agency succeeded in recruiting only a handful of Soviet
spies “with important information to reveal.” Tens of thousands
of “clandestine service officers” ended up gathering “the
barest threads of truly important intelligence.”
Such
an assessment runs counter to a more conventional view that
claims great success for the CIA in its penetration of the
Soviet empire; eg. its recruiting Soviet officials such
as Pyotr Popov, Oleg Penkovsky, Vitaly Yurchenko, Anatoly
Filatov and Adolf Tolkachev. The figures, it is said, provided
valuable facts, including revelations by Mr. Popov's about
Soviet enhanced military capabilities in Europe and by Mr.
Penkovsy about Soviet missile accuracy.
The
real issue is what constitutes success in the intelligence
game. No doubt those “tens of thousands” of CIA officers
worked at recruiting an equivalent number of Soviet-bloc
diplomats, scientists and military officers
posted at embassies and military missions and at the United
Nations. But Soviet intelligence did not sit idly by. It
countered U.S. recruitment attempts by dispatching “dangles”—loyal
officials who feigned disloyalty to the Soviet Union in
order to sow disinformation and confuse the CIA. And the
Soviets, though their own recruiting, embedded moles within
the U.S. intelligence establishment—such as Aldrich Ames
at the CIA and Robert Hanssen at the FBI. Such spies could
identify, in turn, CIA moles among the Soviets.
Thus
short-term “success” was often thwarted in the long-term.
That was the view of James Jesus Angleton (1917-87), the
legendary head of the CIA's counterintelligence staff from
the mid-1950s until the mid-1970s. Angleton explained to
me before he died that recruiting a Soviet-bloc official
was the easy part. The difficult part was winnowing out
the “dangles” and then invisibly managing the careers of
genuine turncoats so that they could commit useful treason.
Angleton
famously believed that many—if not all—the Soviets recruited
by the CIA were either dangles or compromised agents who
might mislead U.S. intelligence. So in the late 1960s Angleton
effectively blocked the CIA's Soviet-bloc recruitment efforts
by having his counterintelligence staff label supposedly
recruited agents unreliable—since their bona fides had not,
in his view, been established. When Angleton was fired on
Christmas Eve in 1974, the CIA's Soviet Bloc Division re-opened
the recruitment floodgates and was back in the espionage
business.
Was
Angleton's obsession with moles and disinformation misguided?
From the evidence in “Legacy of Ashes,” probably not. After
Angleton left, the CIA discovered that Aldrich Ames, the
agency's own head of counterintelligence for the Soviet
Union and Eastern Europe, had been a KGB mole. And it discovered
that it had been receiving Soviet disinformation from myriad
sources. One of Mr. Weiner's more stunning revelations is
that for eight years (1986-94) a large number of the CIA's
highly classified “blue border” reports contained information
from CIA recruits who were “controlled by Russian intelligence.”
The
CIA director signed these blue-border reports—so called
because of their distinctive blue stripes—and sent them
directly to the president, secretary of defense and secretary
of state. Thus Soviet disinformation from the KGB—and Russian
disinformation after the dissolution of empire—had routinely
made its way to President George H.W. Bush and President
Clinton. Mr. Weiner says that, astonishingly, the CIA inspector
general, upon looking into this scandal, found that the
“senior CIA officers responsible for these reports had known
that some of their sources were controlled by Russian intelligence.”
CIA officials continued to forward the Russian disinformation
to the White House because it would be, as Mr. Weiner puts
it, “too embarrassing” to admit that the CIA had been so
badly deceived.
What
distinguishes “Legacy of Ashes” from most other books about
the CIA is that it places the agency's assassination attempts,
coups d'état and other covert actions within a real
political context. By tracing the relations between successive
presidents and the CIA, Mr. Weiner refutes the paranoid
myth that the agency was an out-of-control, rogue entity
or, as some claim, a kind of shadow government. The CIA
has always been a carefully honed instrument of executive
power.
I
do not agree with all of Mr. Weiner's characterizations
of CIA officials. I find his portrayal of James Angleton
as an incompetent and an alcoholic at odds with the trust
that Angleton won over many years from six CIA directors—including
Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, Allen W. Dulles, George H.W. Bush
and Richard Helms. They kept Angleton in key positions and
valued his work. Helms wrote in his autobiography: “In his
day, Jim was recognized as the dominant counterintelligence
figure in the non-communist world.” Such esteem would explain
Angleton's long tenure at the CIA.
But
such differences of opinion in no way diminish my admiration
for what Mr. Weiner has done. “Legacy of Ashes” is a fascinating
and revealing history—a jewel of a book, to borrow a term.
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