Turning the Page: Legacy of Ashes

For all of its “successes” in Iran, Guatemala, Chile and Afghanistan, the CIA’s legacy is largely marked by long-term failures.

The agency failed to give warning of every significant international event from the onset of the Korean War through the Cuban Missile Crisis and the collapse of the Soviet Union up to 9/11.

That history is carefully detailed in New York Times reporter Timothy Weiner’s new book, “Legacy of Ashes.”

Among the choicest anecdotes:

- Then-CIA director George Tenet repeatedly refused to take out Osama Bin Laden despite the fact that the agency’s Afghan proxies tracked the terror chief throughout April and May 1999, “once locking onto him for 36 straight hours.” Weiner writes, “Three times the chance came to strike with cruise missiles. Three times Tenet said no. His confidence in the CIA’s ability to pick its targets had been badly shaken days before” [when US forces mistakenly bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade based on faulty intelligence from the CIA].

- Bill Clinton had a dysfunctional relationship with the agency, only meeting R. James Woolsey twice over two years after becoming director. “I didn’t have a bad relationship with the president,” Woolsey tells Weiner. “I just didn’t have one at all.”

- Clinton further antagonized the agency because he “never came to the CIA to pay respects to the dead and wounded” after a Pakistani-born gunman attacked the agency’s Langley, Va., offices in 1993. “He sent his wife instead.” According to Weiner, “It is hard to exaggerate how much fury this created at headquarters.”

- Clinton also refused to accept one of the agency’s rare, real-time warnings concerning an impending international catastrophe: the genocide in Rwanda. When he chose to intervene in Haiti to support Jean-Bertrand Aristide, he discovered that the priest-turned-president’s major antagonists were drug-dealing Haitian intelligence officials, trained and financed by the CIA.

- From the beginning of the Cold War, Moscow took advantage of the OSS and the CIA, infiltrating their ranks with moles, while the CIA never succeeded in penetrating the Soviet regime or its intelligence agencies. In May 1981, Weiner writes, “[t]he Soviets weighed the rhetoric and the realities of the Reagan Administration and began to fear a surprise attack by the United States. They went on a global nuclear alert that lasted for two years. The superpowers came too close for comfort to an accidental nuclear war without the CIA ever realizing it.”

- Backed by the CIA, Augusto Pinochet came to power and embarked on his “Caravan of Death,” killing at least 3,200 people and having tens of thousands tortured. Throughout that time, Pinochet’s head of intelligence, Manuel Contreras, was on the CIA’s payroll. The CIA held Contreras personally responsible for “thousands of cases of murder and torture” but the risk of clandestine action is the risk of blackmail, and Contreras knew it. So when Contreras murdered Chile’s ambassador to the U.S. and killed a U.S. citizen alongside him, Contreras used the threat of exposing his relationship to the agency as a way to avoid extradition on murder charges.

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