A devastating dismantling of the
CIA and all its crimes,
Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes manages to confirm many existing fears about the meddlesome CIA while exposing it as an aimless and ineffective cabal of special interests and secret missions. How can an organization with a billion-plus dollar budget be both ineffective and worthy of fear? Because it never has to answer for its crimes; because its intelligence and its opinions often shape foreign policy for the United States; and because it has built up for itself enough of a profile, enough of a purpose, to convince its political masters that it should continue its work flailing about in the already troubled nations of the world. Mr. Weiner exhaustively recites the dozens of regimes the CIA has illegally overthrown, pointing out how little a difference was made in these countries even when the CIA got its way.
There are many outside the United States who speak uneasily of our world's most powerful nation. They generate conspiracy theories to explain why the United States is dominant in the world. Legacy of Ashes inflames those fears, throwing a forest's worth of fuel onto that already burning fire. But to blame this book would be only a distraction from the real problem, that the CIA, in the name of the necessity of intelligence, is able to exist and carry out its schemes in spite of its incalculable crimes. Mr. Weiner may have emphasized the bad and minimized the good in his history of the CIA, but I do not blame him. It is an agency whose sins should be brought into the light of truth and exposed for what they are, dirty deeds that cause real damage to real people, the blame for which never seems to fall on the ones who instigate. (4.4/5 Stars)
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