New book tells all about CIA
PRESIDENTS of modern republics, like the pharaohs of Egypt in another age, would like to be remembered by future generations. A few French heads of state have left behind monuments to their own glory.
A glass pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvre is a glittering homage to late François Mitterrand while Jacques Chirac ordered a giant museum to be built to house the relics of primitive art from Africa and the Oceania.
Instead of building monuments, US presidents prefer to leave behind what is known on the other side of the Atlantic as a legacy. Such is currently a major worry for the present tenant of the White House, whose name, whatever he does, it is safe to assume, will irremediably be linked with the Iraq fiasco. Such was the preoccupation also of President Dwight D. Eisenhower at the end of his second term in 1960.
Terribly frustrated over the performance of the Central Intelligence Agency, a pitiful record of gaffes and blunders by an organisation created to provide ears and eyes to the country at the end of the Second World War, the president burst in anger: I have suffered an eight-year defeat on this. He added that he was leaving behind a legacy of ashes to his successor.
Tim Weiner who has been covering the CIA for The New York Times for the past 20 years and has won a Pulitzer for his investigative reporting, borrows Ikes term for the title of his book. Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA is a breathtaking account of an avalanche of blunders, and a few achievements, of the agency in the past six decades.Weiner consulted more than 50,000 documents, mainly from the CIAs own archives, and interviewed hundreds of the agencys veterans. What I have written here is not the whole truth, he says in the preface, but to the best of my ability is nothing but the truth.
Following 9/11, the ultimate tombstone to the secret services monumental collapse as the guiding light of Americas foreign policy and national security, Weiner observes: We are back where we began 60 years ago, in a state of disarray.
As the narrative unfolds at breakneck speed, during these 60 years the CIAs fervour to keep a tab on the march of current history, and repeatedly bumbling efforts to change its course, takes its agents all over Western and Central Europe, Africa, Asia and to the USAs own backyard in South America, at the expense of billions of dollars in unaccounted cash for covert operations, with precious little to show by way of accomplishments.
Pakistan is mentioned, and more than once. From the fateful Francis Gary Powers flight from a secret airbase near Peshawar on May Day in 1960 in the spy aircraft U-2 that was shot down by the Soviets, to the broad daylight assassinations of CIA officials by a Pakistani terrorist on Jan 25, 1993, right at the gate of the agencys headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
The Russians, the Chinese, even the Cubans would have plenty of leisure to target, and occasionally bring down, more U-2s in the course of time. Nothing the CIA does works right. Put together to replace the wartime OSS, the agency was supposed to be the concretisation of the Truman Doctrine: Any attack launched by an American enemy on any nation of the world will be considered an attack on the United States.
Bereft of its Second World War foe, the Nazi regime, the agency considered the Soviet Union the rightful enemy President Harry Truman was alluding to in his historic address to a joint session of the Congress on March 12, 1947. But, as demonstrated by Weiner, the mighty organisation created to fight Marxism could have been run by the Marx brothers themselves, had its record not been splattered with so much gore.
Hundreds of its agents, local but now and then Americans as well, were spotted by the KGB and intelligence agencies belonging to the Eastern European, Asian or South American countries, then arrested, tortured and executed without the CIA being able to identify the mole in its own ranks.
In 1994 the agency spied on its own ambassador in Guatemala, Marilyn McAfee. Secretly planted microphones in her bedroom recorded hushed sweet nothings addressed to someone named Murphy. The CIA promptly sent the Murphy Memo to Washington, incontestably concluding that Her Excellency was having a clandestine amorous affair with her own secretary, a young woman named Carol Murphy, and was hence a lesbian.
It was left to the ambassador herself to prove that her two-year-old black poodle was coincidentally also named Murphy and that those terms of endearment were meant exclusively for his woolly ears.
But the greatest faux pas of all will probably remain the quasi-theatrical performance by the then Secretary of State Colin Powell at the United Nations on Feb 5, 2003, flaunting graphic details of the depots where Saddam was supposed to store his Weapons of Mass Destruction. The images were provided by the CIA. These WMDs never existed.
From Ike to JFK to Nixon, from Carter to Reagan to the Bushes to Clinton, each president was initially aghast to learn of the CIAs covert operations and gargantuan expenses, often without congressional assent, even knowledge. Each president vowed to cut the agency down to size. Each president ended up playing the CIAs game and enhanced its powers to aliment his own fixation.
The result was, inevitably, unfailingly, monumental bloomers. JFKs obsession with the assassination of Fidel Castro drove him to the Bay of Pigs disaster while Nixons determination to use the agencys overseas expertise to spy on political adversaries at home brought him the Watergate stigma.
Jimmy Carters attempts to free American hostages in Iran were an unending tragicomedy and Ronald Reagan barely escaped with the skin of his teeth the Iran-Contra fiasco, though his legacy will remain his Mosaic commandment before the Berlin wall: Mr Gorbachev, bring down that wall!
The less said about Bill Clinton the better. In Weiners words: No commander in chief since Calvin Coolidge had come to the White House thinking less about the wider world. When he spun the globe, it always came back to rest on the United States.
Clinton was not the least interested in the agencys work. The CIA director of the time, Jim Woolsey, put it succinctly: I didnt have a bad relationship with the president. I just didnt have one at all! Clintons gaffes include ordering a shower of Tomahawk missiles on a house in Iraq identified by the CIA as a terrorist training camp and ending in the massacre of an entire family.
Following the bombings of US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998, he ordered similar firing of a dozen or so cruise missiles (a million dollars a piece) on the supposed hideout of Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan (also pinpointed by the CIA). At the receiving end of the deadly rain this time was a caravan of 20 camel riders. The agency would miss many more chances to get Bin Laden.
DAWN - Editorial; September 23, 2007
