Legacy of Ashes (The History of the C.I.A.)
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“Not everyone arrested was a terrorist”: Tenet remarks, Nixon Center Distinguished Service Award Banquet, December 11, 2002. The agency acknowledged in December 2006 that it had been holding fourteen “high-value” prisoners in its secret jails and was transferring them to Guantánamo.
Chapter Forty-nine
He based that statement on the confessions of a single source: “Postwar Findings,” Senate intelligence committee, September 8, 2006.
“It was the wrong thing to do”: Tenet testimony, July 26, 2006, cited in “Postwar Findings,” September 8, 2006.
“We did not have many Iraqi sources”: James L. Pavitt remarks, Foreign Policy Association, June 21, 2004. The best source the CIA had was provided by the French intelligence service, which had cultivated Naji Sabri, Iraq’s foreign minister, as its agent. Sabri said that Saddam did not have an active nuclear or biological weapons program. Evidently his reporting was rejected. Sabri was the man to whom Tenet referred in a February 5, 2004, speech, when he said the CIA had had “a source who had direct access to Saddam and his inner circle.” The CIA had almost no ability to analyze accurately what little intelligence it had. Its experts were few and far between, and they were supported by scores of rookies. After 9/11, “analysts unfamiliar with terrorism, al-Qaida, or Southwest Asia were scrambling to get up to speed on their new assignments,” noted the CIA veteran Bruce Berkowitz. “Months later, people were still rearranging furniture, remodeling offices, and rewiring computers.” Berkowitz, “Failing to Keep Up with the Information Revolution,” Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 47, No. 1, 2003, CIA/CSI.
“If we are not believed, we have no purpose”: Richard Helms, “Intelligence in American Society,” Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 11, No. 3, Summer 1967, CIA/CSI. The article was adapted from a speech Helms gave to the Council on Foreign Relations on April 17, 1967.
“Ultimately, I think, the Iraqis were right”: Duelfer remarks, Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia, April 22, 2005.
“We were bereft of any human intelligence”: David Kay, “Weapons of Mass Destruction: Lessons Learned and Unlearned,” Miller Center Report, Vol. 20, No. 1, Spring/Summer 2004.
Tenet looked him in the eye: Colonel Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s top military assistant, was there when it happened. “I can still hear George Tenet telling me, and telling my boss in the bowels of the CIA” that the intelligence was rock solid, said Colonel Wilkerson. “I sat in the room looking into his eyes, as did the Secretary of State, and heard it with the firmness that only George could give it…. George Tenet assuring Colin Powell that the information he was presenting at the U.N. was ironclad, only to have that same individual call the Secretary on more than one occasion in the ensuing months after the presentation and tell him that central pillars of his presentation were indeed false.” Wilkerson remarks, New American Foundation, October 19, 2005; Wilkerson interview, Frontline, “The Dark Side,” December 13, 2005, edited transcript available online at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/darkside/inter views/wilkerson.html.
“I think we did get Saddam Hussein”: Off Target: The Conduct of the War and Civilian Casualties in Iraq, Human Rights Watch, December 2003. The report concluded: “The intelligence for 50 strikes aimed at 55 members of the Iraqi leadership was perfect: not one leader was killed but dozens of civilians died.”
The agency had predicted that thousands of Iraqi soldiers and their commanders would surrender: That was the last word on the eve of the ground attack, said army major general James Thurman, the overall operations director for the invasion. “We were told that by the CIA,” said General Thurman. “And that isn’t what happened. We had to fight our way through every town.” Thurman quoted in Thomas Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin, 2006), p. 118.
Major General Abed Hamed Mowhoush, who…had turned himself in voluntarily to American forces: Command’s Responsibility: Detainee Deaths in U.S. Custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, Human Rights First, February 22, 2006.
“the cause celebre for jihadists”: declassified excerpt in “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,” April 2006, CIA.
“Every Army of liberation”: Lieutenant General David H. Petraeus, “Learning Counterinsurgency: Observations from Soldiering in Iraq,” Military Review, January–February 2006. The article is posted in the U.S. Army Professional Writing Collection, available online at http://www.army.mil/ professionalwriting/volumes/volume4/april_2006/.
“As Iraq transitions from tyranny to self-determination”: Pavitt remarks, Foreign Policy Association, June 21, 2004.
too many hours drinking at the Babylon bar: Lindsay Moran, who quit the clandestine service in 2003 and based her statement on reports from friends and colleagues at the Baghdad station, said: “The climate there is such that you simply cannot conduct standard case officer operations. A male colleague has described it to me as a kind of relentless overage frat party in Baghdad; that is, the case officers, without being able to conduct operations, are just sort of forced to stay on the compound and party.” Moran remarks, “U.S. Intelligence Reform and the WMD Commission Report,” American Enterprise Institute, May 4, 2005. 493–94 “They had grave, grave difficulty finding a competent individual”: Crandall oral history, Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, Iraq Experience Project, September 20, 2004.
“misinformed, misleading, and just plain wrong”: Tenet statement, CIA Office of Public Affairs, August 11, 2003.
it no longer mattered much to the White House: By 2004, it was clear that intelligence analysis was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, wrote Paul Pillar, the national intelligence officer for the Middle East from 2000 to 2005. “What is most remarkable about prewar U.S. intelligence is not that it got things wrong and misled policymakers; it is that it played so small a role in one of the most important U.S. policy decisions in recent decades.” Paul Pillar, “Unheeded Intelligence,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2006.
“just guessing”: Bush news conference, September 21, 2004. The president dismissed pessimistic reports from the Baghdad station chief as defeatist drivel.
“We’re at war”: Silberman remarks, “U.S. Intelligence Reform and the WMD Commission Report,” American Enterprise Institute, May 4, 2005.
“even more misleading”: Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, March 31, 2005.
“Those were the two dumbest words I ever said”: Tenet remarks, Kutztown University, April 27, 2005.
“the meteor strikes on the dinosaurs”: Richard Kerr, Thomas Wolfe, Rebecca Donegan, and Aris Pappas, “Collection and Analysis on Iraq: Issues for the US Intelligence Community,” Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 49, No. 3, 2005, CIA/CSI.
“We didn’t get the job done”: Tenet remarks, Kutztown University, April 27, 2005.
“We think intelligence is important to win wars”: Kay, “Weapons of Mass Destruction.”
Chapter Fifty
In his farewell at CIA headquarters: Tenet remarks, CIA Office of Public Affairs, July 8, 2004. Unlike Tenet, Nixon in his own farewell speech had the good grace to quote the full passage about the man in the arena, “whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again because there is not effort without error and shortcoming, but who does actually strive to do the deed, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumphs of high achievements and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.”
a painful personal memoir: George Tenet with Bill Harlow, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA (New York: HarperCollins, 2007). The cited passages are on pages 110 and 232. Tenet did himself no favors by opening the book with a dramatic story about confronting the neoconservative mandarin Richard Perle outside the West Wing of the White House on Sep
tember 12, 2001, and Perle saying: “Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday.” Perle was in France on that day; the quotation was at best a howling error. Tenet’s owning up to the CIA’s mistakes was admirable as far as it went. But he called himself “a member of a Greek chorus” and “a prop on the set” at Colin Powell’s United Nations speech—every passage of which he had defended. He tried to explain away “slam dunk,” but he could not. Tenet’s book was attacked upon publication from right, left, and center. Among its few defenders were six senior officers who had served Tenet. They wrote an open letter calling him a man with “the courage to acknowledge errors that were made and accept the responsibility that belongs to him and the intelligence community he led.”
“I couldn’t get a job with CIA today”: Goss told an interviewer, on camera, in a clip transcribed and posted by the leftist filmmaker Michael Moore. “I was in CIA from approximately the late 50’s to approximately the early 70’s. And it’s true I was a case officer, clandestine service officer, and yes, I do understand the core mission of the business. I couldn’t get a job with CIA today. I am not qualified. I don’t have the language skills. I, you know, my language skills were romance languages and stuff. We’re looking for Arabists today. I don’t have the cultural background probably. And I certainly don’t have the technical skills.”
“a stilted bureaucracy incapable of even the slightest bit of success”: Goss printed statement, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, June 21, 2004.
“it will take us another five years of work to have the kind of clandestine service our country needs”: Tenet statement for the record, 9/11 Commission, April 14, 2004.
“We haven’t done strategic intelligence for so long”: Ford interview with author.
“It is an organization that thrives through deception”: Hamre interview with author.
“Can CIA meet the ongoing threat?” Hart remarks, Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia, December 3, 2004.
“We can’t get qualified people”: Smith quoted in CIA Support Functions: Organization and Accomplishments of the DDA-DDS Group, 1953–1956, Vol. 2, Chap. 3, p. 128, Director of Central Intelligence Historical Services, declassified March 6, 2001, CIA/CREST.
“I don’t want to give aid and comfort to the enemy by telling you how bad I think the problem is”: Goss testimony, Senate intelligence committee, September 14, 2004.
“I never in my wildest dreams expected I’d be back here”: Goss transcript, CIA Office of Public Affairs, September 24, 2004, declassified July 2005.
He would not wear two hats, like his predecessors. He would wear five: Within a few months, Goss, who preferred not to work a five-day week, was complaining that he was exhausted: “The jobs I’m being asked to do, the five hats I wear, are too much for this mortal,” he said in remarks at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library on March 2, 2005.
He forced almost every one of the CIA’s most senior officers out the door: Goss sacked the number-two man, Deputy Director of Central Intelligence John McLaughlin; the number-three man, Executive Director Buzzy Krongard; the chief and the deputy chief of the clandestine service, Stephen Kappes and Michael Sulick; the chief of intelligence analysis, Jami Miscik; the chief of the counterterrorist center, Robert Grenier; and the barons who ran operations in Europe, the Near East, and Asia. In all, Goss got rid of three dozen of the CIA’s top people in a matter of months.
John D. Negroponte: Born in London in 1939, the son of a Greek shipping magnate, Negroponte had gone to Yale with Goss but gravitated toward the State Department instead of the CIA. After a tour in Saigon, he landed on Henry Kissinger’s National Security Council staff, in charge of the Vietnam portfolio. He had been President Reagan’s ambassador to Honduras, where he worked closely with the CIA and the brutal Honduran military. Negroponte served for nineteen months as director of national intelligence before stepping down to take the number-two post at the State Department. He left little visible progress behind.
“That sent seismic shudders through the intelligence community”: Joan A. Dempsey, “The Limitations of Recent Intelligence Reforms,” Harvard seminar, Program on Information Resources Policy, February 23, 2006. “We’re fighting the last war,” Dempsey said. The men and women of American intelligence “spin a lot of wheels trying to deliver on what is expected of them, but in my opinion they just don’t have the capabilities surrounding them that really allow them to succeed.”
“nobody had any idea of who was doing what where”: Fingar interview with author.
“And we do not live in the best of worlds”: Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, March 31, 2005.
“the burial ceremony”: Goss interview with Mark K. Matthews, Orlando Sentinel, September 8, 2006.
“the Ethic’s Guy”: U.S. v. Kyle Dustin Foggo, United States District Court, San Diego, February 13, 2007.
“The distrust of the Americans increased”: U.S. vs. David Passaro, United States District Court, Raleigh, North Carolina, February 13, 2007.
Arar, who had been seized by the CIA: In 2003, during the months of Arar’s ordeal, President Bush noted in passing that Syria’s rulers had left “a legacy of torture” to its people.
“The only remaining superpower”: Helms interview with author.
PHOTOGRAPHY CREDITS
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ALSO BY TIM WEINER
Blank Check: The Pentagon’s Black Budget
Betrayal: The Story of Aldrich Ames, an American Spy (with David Johnston and Neil A. Lewis)
FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, APRIL 2008
Copyright © 2007 by Tim Weiner
All Rights Reserved
Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2006.
www.anchorbooks.com
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Weiner, Tim.
Legacy of ashes: the history of the Central Intelligence Agency /
by Tim Weiner.—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-45562-8
1. United States. Central Intelligence Agency—History.
2. Intelligence service—United States—History. 3. United States—
History—1945–I. Title.
JK468.I6W44 2007
327.1273009—dc22
2007004077
v1.0
Table of Contents
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
AUTHOR’S NOTE
PART ONE | "In the Beginning, We Knew Nothing” "The CIA Under Truman, 1945 to 1953
1. “INTELLIGENCE MUST BE GLOBAL AND TOTALITARIAN”
2. “THE LOGIC OF FORCE”
3. “FIGHT FIRE WITH FIRE”
4. “THE MOST SECRET THING”
5. “A RICH BLIND MAN”
6. “THEY WERE SUICIDE MISSIONS”
7. “A VAST FIELD OF ILLUSION”
PART TWO | A Strange Kind of Genius” The CIA Under Eisenhower, 1953 to 1961
8. “WE HAVE NO PLAN”
9. “CIA’S GREATEST SINGLE TRIUMPH”
10. “BOMB REPEAT BOMB”
11. “AND THEN WE’LL HAVE A STORM”
12. “WE RAN IT IN A DIFFERENT WAY”
13. “WISHFUL BLINDNESS”
14. “HAM-HANDED OPERATIONS OF ALL KINDS”
15. “A VERY STRANGE WAR”
16. “HE WAS LYING DOWN AND HE WAS LYING UP”
PART THREE | Lost Causes The CIA Under Kennedy and Johnson, 1961 to 1968
17. “NOBODY KNEW WHAT TO DO”
18. “WE HAD ALSO FOOLED OURSELVES”