A Review of Legacy of Ashes – The History of the CIA
The subject of this book review is Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, authored by New York Times writer Tim Weiner and published in 2007. The book is based on more than 50,000 documents, many from the CIA’s own archives, as well as interviews with former director of central intelligence and employees of the agency. It charts the course of the Central Intelligence Agency from its previous incarnation as the Office of Strategic Services in World War II through its inception in 1947 up until the present day.
Unlike most histories of the CIA or accounts dealing with the agency’s activities, Legacy of Ashes presents the case that the CIA was never very effective, suffering one humiliating setback after another. This is a quite different look at the activities of the agency, as numerous other accounts examine more conspiratorial aspects of various operations. These books often grant the CIA abilities which Weiner argues it never had; namely, a clear understanding of the world, the ability to infiltrate communist movements in the Soviet Union and third-world countries, and reasonable planning as a result of good leadership.
In fact, in reading the book, it almost seems to appear that Weiner is presenting the “Homer Simpson” view of the CIA: blundering headlong into situations it never understood, putting untold numbers of people in harm’s way that often led to their torture and death due to the agency’s own incompetence, and further compounded with laziness and alcoholism. Throughout the CIA’s history, there are numerous accounts of various operations where agents were dropped into communist countries with instructions to begin resistance movements and infiltrate the Soviet System, only to be promptly identified, captured, tortured for information, and exterminated. Failure after failure did not deter these types of operations, or cause more than a momentary frustration on the part of the CIA in not knowing how the Soviets knew so quickly and so clearly everything that the US was doing to undermine it.
With each unsuccessful covert operation, the main objective of the agency was to cover up the incompetence — not learn from previous mistakes. The agency, especially under director Allen Dulles, utilized access to the media to prevent any leaks of these mistakes. As long as the people of America did not hear about the failures, and the documents could be destroyed or classified until long after the fact, they simply did not exist.
Weiner’s book also examines the very precarious relationship that each president of the United States had with the Central Intelligence Agency. From President Truman, who wanted a daily newspaper on what was happening in the world, to Nixon, who blamed the CIA for his failure to win the presidency in 1960 and used it for his own illegal purposes as president, to Clinton, who displayed less interest in foreign affairs than any president before him, the agency was pulled from one extreme to another throughout its existence. Presidents used the CIA for illegal acts against American citizens and to overthrow unfriendly governments, putting the agency in jeopardy of being caught and the bright light of public scrutiny shined upon it. Others dismissed or totally ignored the CIA, causing it to languish and its work to become less and less relevant. Weiner mentions George W. Bush’s 2004 remark that the CIA was “just guessing” about the Iraq War as a “political death sentence.”
An important distinction that Weiner raises in this book is the difference between the intelligence-gathering aspect of the CIA and the “cloak and dagger” operations. One seeks to understand the world; the other seeks to change the world. The agency, though, attempted to do both and was unable to perform either action effectively. A far greater share of the CIA’s budget was devoted towards covert operations involving propaganda, assassinating heads of state, and overthrowing democratically-elected governments. Many of these operations failed, and the most successful of them resulted in the infamous “blowback:” unintended consequences like a hatred of the USA in Iran, hundreds of thousands of dead civilians in Guatemala under an oppressive regime, and the Islamic holy war that was directed at America as soon as the Soviets had left Afghanistan at the end of the Cold War.
These failed attempts to mold the world in the CIA’s eyes, along with the lack of interest and resources available for intelligence gathering and analysis, have resulted in an agency that missed one important event after another, while predicting things that never existed. The CIA underestimated the Soviet’s and India’s ability to build a nuclear weapon, the testing of which came as complete surprises to the agency. They also predicted that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before the US invasion in 2003, among other predictions and suggestions, nearly all of which turned out to be wrong.
The agency, under nineteen directors of central intelligence, had never achieved its role of providing the US with a clear understanding of the world. It seemed to be at its most effective during covert operations, overthrowing governments, creating its own image of itself in American media, trading weapons for hostages, or conducting extraordinary rendition programs in secret prisons around the world. None of these covert actions, though, ever resulted in one continuously positive consequence for the agency or the United States. Weiner argues that the same problems that faced the agency in its beginnings are the same ones facing it now: an inability to gather intelligence and effectively analyze it, a willingness to take on illegal covert operations without a thought to potential consequences, and a lack of qualified personnel to carry out any of its activities.
Obviously, the CIA is an easy target to take shots at when it is down, possibly at its lowest point in public opinion of its existence. However, Legacy of Ashes’ central point is to argue that the agency was never really up to begin with, and its few shining success stories are overshadowed by a long history of failed missions and an unhealthy but potentially justifiable resentment against America. Weiner’s book misses issues (such as the CIA’s role in the international drug trade), but his unique perspective on the history of the agency presents one of the most intriguing looks at the CIA ever published.
For anyone who wants to understand the role of this agency in the world in general and its relationship to each of the holders of the office of the President of the United States, Legacy of Ashes answers the most important questions that can be asked, and refreshingly presents all of its answers on the record, with no use of confidential sources or classified documents. It is an unparalleled, timely, and significant history of the Central Intelligence Agency.
The Dangers of Blood Transfusions
When a person is given a blood transfusion, that person is really only receiving part of the blood that has been donated for his or her use. The transfusions typically transfuse only the red blood cells that have been donated. The red color is due to hemoglobin. Hemoglobin is the protein part of red blood cells which also carries oxygen from the lungs through the body.
Blood is carried through the body by the arteries and veins and is powered by the heart. When a body does not have enough blood in the blood vessels, the heart cannot maintain enough blood pressure to push blood through the tissues. This leads to tissue death from a lack of oxygen.
Blood transfusions are used to correct two main, major types of problems. The first problem is acute and massive blood loss. This empties the blood vessels to the degree that the heart cannot maintain enough blood pressure to move the blood through the body. The second problem is severe anemia. Severe anemia is when there is enough blood volume in the body but not enough red blood cells in the blood to get oxygen to the body’s tissues.
During a case with massive hemorrhage, a blood transfusion is the only practical option to keep the system working. The pressure of a system can be maintained by infusing plasma or certain artificial materials but something must be infused. During World War II, lives were saved by transfusing plasma or plastic in solution. Other lives were lost due to a lack of red blood cells. To prevent disastrous reactions in people receiving blood transfusions, blood is typed and marked properly. This helps to ensure that the body of the person receiving the transfusion doesn’t reject the blood.
Unfortunately, this life-saving technique has many dangers. The first danger occurs in the event that the blood is not transfused at a rate that the heart can handle. If the blood is put into the body too quickly, the heart cannot pump it quickly enough which leads to fluid accumulation in the lungs.
When blood is not typed correctly, the transfused blood cells can be destroyed and rejected by the body. This can lead to damage to the kidneys and severe illness in the recipient. In addition, white blood cells remaining in the blood unit can clump together or release chemicals causing lung disease or severe fever. During storage, blood can become contaminated by bacteria. When introduced to the body, this can lead to potentially fatal infections.
One of the biggest risks is from blood that has not been screened properly. Blood screened properly can contain viruses and other parasites. Prior to the official recognition of AIDS, numerous people were infected with HIV when they received a blood transfusion. Now, they screen blood very carefully but it is still possible for a person’s blood to slip through a crack.
For more information on the dangers of blood transfusions, please visit http://www.habush.com.
Generation Debt – Our Children Will Hate Us
Historians like to classify generations of Americans from different time periods in rather large buckets, painting an entire generation with the brush of genius or triumph based on the challenges of their time. There’s the generation of Americans who grew up in the Depression era, known for their ability to persevere and succeed in the most trying of financial times. Then, there’s “The Greatest Generation”, who were drawn into the largest war the world has ever seen and with the help of global allies, bested the largest forces of evil and destruction the world had ever seen. Of course, this same “Greatest Generation” is sometimes criticized for being the generation that for the most part, did not contribute anything to Social Security, yet reaped its benefits in retirement. At the same time, hoards of senior citizens flock to local board meetings to vote down school budgets and are a true force for frugality and self-preservation. But are they? Is it reasonable to expect that taxes, health care expenses and educational costs should grow at 2-3 times inflation while municipalities and states still run a deficit? The successes in World War II and the unarguable fact that they literally saved the world tends to win out in a chorus of few critics.
What About Our Generation?
How will historians view our generation? By all accounts, our generation was set up for total success. The following phenomena occurred during the few past decades that should have catapulted America even further onto the pinnacle of the world state and set up future generations for success and frankly, complete domination in virtually every measurable aspect of success:
The advancement of the internet into a full-fledged force for business, free speech, innovation and productivity. Virtually all early gains from the internet from global investment in venture capital, to patents and inventions, to new business startups, resided in the United States. We saw our equities markets rally to the point of “irrational exuberance”.
- The decline and fall of the world last formidable force of evil in the world: The collapse of the Soviet Union, rendered a mere cold war relic. The Russian military had fallen into such shambles that they could barely pay or feed their soldiers. Russia moved from an equally formidable war power to a hobbled has-been on the global stage. America outspent them in the cold war. The genetically engineered biological weapons and nuclear arsenals uncovered following their collapse was bone-chilling.
- Globalization turned the world upside-down. American multinationals were now able to sell their wares to billions upon billions of consumers that were once unreachable. Low skill, low paying jobs shifted from the shores of America to other countries that were willing to work that Americans were no longer willing to given other opportunities for higher paying, higher skilled roles as well as a shift to an Intellectual Property/Knowledge economy. This was the theory of comparative advantage put to its test.
- Our universities continued to be unparalleled in terms of quality output, ROI and any other measure to the point that the best and the brightest the world over sought to gain entries into our universities.
Future Generations: Our Children…Will Hate Us
What did we do with all these accoutrements? These gifts our generation was blessed with? We squandered probably the best opportunity any generation has ever been presented with. Just during the past decade, we’ve seen our country decline in virtually every category of import, with no end to the decline in sight.
- From a diplomatic standpoint, we initially recovered from a horrific attack on our shores and gained new allies and sympathy to some degree from countries that were initially indifferent or misaligned with our interests. Within 3 years, we completely obliterated any goodwill that remained in the world and drove an invasion of Iraq in a moderately stable region, forcing it into complete chaos. We “misunderestimated” what we were doing there, went in light trying to save a dime, misread what the true experts were telling our leaders about cultural, regional and religious factors that they couldn’t comprehend, and along the way, we’ve again created a generation of noble and well-meaning soldiers who fought a war that the country and the world wasn’t totally behind. This takes a toll on a population of soldiers, one that we haven’t yet begun to understand.
- Iran and North Korea became emboldened by our folly in Iraq and Russia reemerged on the global stage, wielding enough power with their natural gas supplies and oil revenues to threaten US interests, intimidate allies and once again command respect.
- We continued to spend like there was no tomorrow. Individual, national and local debt soared to heights that were unsustainable. We did this without blinking. By all measures, some sort of reversion to the mean should have been forced to occur, but no, we continued to spend unabated.
- We lulled ourselves into the belief that home prices could continue upward forever at a rate several times the rate of inflation (even though the long term trend going back to the 1800s shows that home prices appreciate roughly in line with inflation).
- In the heat of euphoria and sheer greed, politicians pandered to constituents calling for more lax lending regulations so everyone could own a home, even though we’ve subsequently learned that perhaps not everyone is capable, responsible enough or otherwise, to actually own a home.
Lenders readily complied, going so far as to award massive mortgages to people with no discernible income or personal holdings. The jobless and risk-taking masses could waltz into a lender and walk out with a $500,000 waterfront condo in Miami ready for the flip the very same day. Wall street, in turn created exotic instruments that not even they ultimately understood to “diversify risk” and peddled them to investors the world wide while collecting exorbitant fees on their misunderstood and poorly conceptualized products.
- Our country’s financial institutions exported our toxic waste mortgage assets to virtually every global financial institution on earth due to our perceived credibility. We have inexorably damaged our credibility on the world stage forever.
- In order to bail ourselves out, our leaders passed bailout after bailout in frenzied fashion, all the while, paying million dollar retention bonuses to retain the same inept bankers that got us into this mess and rewarding the mortgage brokers with new business on reworking mortgages and refinancing deals – the same ones that falsified records and sold irresponsible loans to people that didn’t have the capacity to understand what they were getting into. The ill-conceived TARP is losing value at an alarming rate.
States, municipalities, pension funds, virtually every organization charged with maintaining a budget, went into the red and started requesting their bailout. How could the same state that was the epicenter of the internet boom, the biotech boom (and Hollywood?!) and all its benefits be bankrupt less than a decade later? How could states take a windfall tobacco settlement and shamelessly squander it on other spending programs, debt and other unintended destinations?
- We elected a president on a platform of tax increases and spending restraint and “change” from the prior regime that is already pushing the next round of giveaways in the form of tax breaks that, as we’ve seen before, pretty much end up paying down debt or going into savings.
What Have We Done?
- We have saddled future generations of Americans with our debts that they will be unable to pay. Few will be able to pay their own way through college like earlier generations could. They will have to work longer and harder than prior generations for a lower standard of living that what we enjoyed. Our standing on the world stage has been tarnished.
Believe it or not, I’m an optimist. Perhaps the recent economic turmoil has been a wakeup call. Perhaps the boom-bust cycle that we continue to set ourselves up for will not be so bad next time because we’ve finally learned what happens when self-serving politicians focused solely on what it takes to win the next election is combined with unbridled human greed and instant gratification. Can we get ourselves out of this? Anything’s possible. We’ve managed to overcome substantial challenges in prior generations. I’d like to think that by the time I retire, that generation of children has a decent shot a college and a steady job without the assistance of generational wealth. I’d like to think that the world sees America as a force for good again. I’d like to think we turn this around.
For, if we don’t, our children will hate us.