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Reading about the CIA doesn't inspire confidence

James Klurfeld

August 7, 2008

The review warned, "Don't take this book on vacation. It isn't summer reading. Too depressing. Too relentlessly negative. Save it for a cold winter night."

But just as I was about to leave for Cape Cod last week, I bought a paperback copy of "Legacy of Ashes, A History of the CIA" by Tim Weiner anyway. And between swims in the ocean, bay and ponds of Wellfleet, I became engrossed in the gory but solidly documented reporting on the unremitting failures of the agency. Many of the revelations are the result of recently declassified information as well as dogged reporting. Thousands have died, billions have been wasted on CIA plots.

Weiner's book might not be your choice for seaside reading, but it ought to be required reading for our next president, whether Barack Obama or John McCain. The take-away from learning about six decades of mostly failed intelligence operations, especially covert operations, is that it was the presidents and their top national security advisers who failed to understand the limits of American power or to provide the type of oversight needed to prevent a secret agency from going out of control.

Reaching out to the agency to try to manipulate world events - whether it was John and Robert Kennedy trying to assassinate Fidel Castro or George W. Bush trying to interrogate suspected terrorists - has proved to be an irresistible temptation, too often with terribly negative consequences.

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Instead of flying all over the country and world making promises that have little to do with the real choices that will face the next resident of the White House, the candidates would be better served gaining some insight into why this nation hasn't been better served by its premier intelligence agency. And I'm not just talking about the relatively inexperienced Obama. McCain and his foreign policy team could well perpetuate the agency's blundering past.

One of Weiner's main points is that from the beginning, the agency's heads were more interested in covert operations than in the less glamorous, day-to-day work of gathering and analyzing information. But, as Weiner also makes clear, so were their bosses, the presidents. In the end, the producers of intelligence are only as good as the consumers want them to be. Too often, when intelligence didn't conform to preconceived notions, it was ignored.

The major point isn't how many times the CIA failed to predict events, from the Soviet nuclear bomb or the collapse of the Soviet Union to the "slam dunk" assertion that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. It's a lesson about the limits of American power.

Some say that Weiner is too critical of the agency, not recognizing the difficulty of penetrating closed societies or predicting events being carried out in secret. Or that he doesn't appreciate the challenges of the times, when policy makers in the 1950s and 1960s believed our very way of life was being challenged by Communism or, now, by Islamic radicalism.

What a rush of power a president must feel moving into the White House - especially when it comes to national security, where there's much less congressional interference than with domestic policy. At times, it must have seemed easier to overthrow a government than to get a bill passed.

But our actions overseas can have consequences for decades. Overthrow an elected government in Iran in 1953 (viewed by many as a CIA triumph) but then have to deal with the Iranian Revolution and, now, Tehran's determination to have nuclear weapons. Help defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan (another CIA triumph), but, by doing so, create a vacuum for the Taliban and Osama bin Laden.

Ironically, Bush had it right when he was first running for president. That was when he advocated a more modest foreign policy for the United States, in a debate with Al Gore. Too bad it turned out to be campaign rhetoric.