They had to learn by doing and learn from their mistakes. They didn't really know what they were doing. He didn't stop and say this isn't working, we're sacrificing lives. YDSTIE: What's astounding about this is that Wisner sent people in and never heard from them again and he kept doing it. And they put them into planes and they strapped on parachutes and they flung them out into the darkness. WEINER: And instead they took thousands of recruited foreign agents, Koreans, Chinese, other Asians, and hundreds of recruited foreign agents from Eastern and Central Europe and Russia. YDSTIE: And Wisner actually sacrificed hundreds of lives trying to do this during the Korean War. And that got the United States into a good deal of trouble. He was interested in covert action, making kings and breaking them, changing the world instead of knowing the world. TIM WEINER: Frank Wisner was not interested in espionage, which is the core mission of the CIA. Weiner says men like Frank Wisner virtually invented America's clandestine service in the first days of the Cold War. In a new history of the CIA called 'Legacy of Ashes,' New York Times reporter Tim Weiner traces some of the failings of the CIA today back to that founding generation. One of those originals, Frank Wisner, was a lawyer, a World War II spy, and a man who by the end of the 1950s would go mad.

It overthrew foreign governments, even attempted to assassinate foreign leaders, actions that are now recalled more with embarrassment than pride. Under them, in the 1950s, America's spy agency launched audacious operations. Military and C.I.A.At the dawn of the Cold War, Allen Dulles, Richard Bissell and Frank Wisner were considered daring, imaginative and brilliant. They really only serve one goal, the maintenance of American, and thus capitalist, global hegemony at any expense. Like any other of the myriad departments, bureaus or agencies that make up the US government they don't exist as some kind of accident or deviation from some pure ideal of American democracy. Tim Weiner's constant representation of the CIA as a bumbling mess staffed by failson Yale graduate James bond wannabes serves to whitewash the true aims of this organization. The existence of these unaccountable organizations is simply a mistake that could have been rectified had the right person been elected to some position before everything went wrong.

That the United States, despite some mistakes in its past, is ultimately a force for good in the world. These organizations deviate from this vague idea of what the US represents in their mind. Beyond that however, Tim Weiner's thesis is like that of many other liberals: that the CIA and its analogues in the US government are aberrations. I have few positive things to say about this book.Īs far as a one volume history of the CIA is concerned this is probably the best you're gonna get.

Legacy of Ashes by Tim Weiner