"Legacy of Ashes"

Why the CIA is better at making messes than achieving anything constructive.

In 2008, the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Tim Weiner, wrote a history of the CIA titled Legacy of Ashes, in which he laid bare the agency’s long history of bumbling around and making messes, thereby imperiling U.S. national security instead of advancing it.

As I read Weiner’s portrait, it occurred to me that the CIA primarily views its mission abroad as one of aggressive meddling—that is, sowing chaos for the heads of state that it deems hostile to U.S. interests.

At first glance, it may sound like a worthy mission to make trouble for one’s enemies. The problem is, the guys at the CIA are far better at meddling in the world than they are at understanding the world. They remind me of myself when I was a twelve-year-old prankster who played tricks on the adults in the neighborhood whom I regarded as a bunch of fuddy-duddies.

A striking example of the meddler’s mentality is discernible in this 2016 Charlie Rose interview with former CIA deputy director, Michael Morell—a key player in fabricating the baloney about Sadddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction posing a threat to the world. Morell later apologized to Colin Powell for this boo-boo, but the experience apparently didn’t sober him one bit.

Note Morell’s apparent lack of awareness of the limitations of his power to change people, and his presumption that he is right about who should be running foreign countries. Note as well that he doesn’t seems to give much consideration to at least the possibility that—for all of their faults—the guys who run foreign countries may be better than the men who will take their place in a CIA-induced power vacuum.

Nowadays we constantly hear that Vladimir Putin is a bad guy, but I’ve not once heard a single member of our chattering class express the slightest notion of who would, realistically speaking, be a better man or woman to lead Russia—a vast country that has always had a fraught relationship with the West.

Most people in the West would doubtless be surprised to learn that Putin is moderate compared to several Russian nationalists who believe that Russia should take a far harder line against the West.

The meddlers in Washington and their cronies fantasize about putting a U.S. vassal in the Kremlin, but I doubt this is evenly remotely realistic.

In many respects, the CIA reminds me of men and women who marry and divorce several times, each time with the belief that the next one will be a better fit. It never seems to occur to these people that the trouble doesn’t lie with a particular girl or guy, but with human nature and the human condition.