I just finished reading a book called Legacy of Ashes by Tim Weiner, a history of the CIA. Apparently every statement in the book is documented which makes the book authoritative. Reading the book made me realize just how totally f***ed the CIA was.
It failed to predict or anticipate most of the major events of the second half of the century. Like what? Like the Berlin Wall going up. Like the Korean War. Like China entering the Korean War. France getting its butt kicked in Vietnam…America getting its butt kicked in Vietnam. The Russian invasion of Afghanistan. The Berlin Wall coming down. Russia abandoning communism. The various attacks on US embassies. Any number of uprisings and insurrections. Sept 11… it’s a long and impressive list.
But what was really scary was the next realization: that thru the CIA’s efforts, and in line with a remorseless intent, the US is basically responsible for any number of terrible conditions on the planet today. Beginning way back when the CIA was seeking to undermine communism by supporting totalitarian, genocidal, psychopaths, all the way to predicting that US soldiers would be met with flowers when they rolled into Iraq the CIA seems to have been behind or actively encouraged every disgusting attack on other nations’ rights to self-government since 1947.
I guess if that’s how the US sees its way forward as an international political force then who could blame the CIA for doing the job as badly as it has. But on the other hand, considering the grief that the US reaps as a result of these continuing transgressions against other peoples’ sovereignty in the name of – um, freedom – you’d think someone would wake up and smell the mass graves (and diminished quality of life for US citizens), but apparently not.
It’s a very interesting book, if only to see how utterly incompetent the CIA and especially its leaders and the leaders of those leaders have been through the decades. Probably one of the most dangerous occupations on the planet was being an agent for the CIA, since it managed to kill, betray, lose, abandon an alarming number of operatives.
During the Cold War it managed to lose almost every agent it sent to spy Russia or China. And that continued as an operating principle. It’s startling how incompetent the CIA has been considering the massive amounts of money it has handled. It’s hard to think of any other professional entity that could have gotten away with being so unremittingly unsuccessful for so long. And not just unsuccessful but actively disastrous to itself and anyone it was in contact with.
When I finished the book I thought: Phew. Those guys have been writing 20th century history like a one legged, epileptic drunk with a spray can. No wonder it has been such a mess.
Check the book out: Legacy of Ashes, The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner. Probably on Amazon.
I wonder why the CIA hasn’t lost all their funding by now, they are probably the worst organization to be formed…