ANY history of a secret agency is bound to be, in certain important respects, provisional.
Even when you take that real-world caveat into account, however, it still is clear that Tim Weiner's "Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA" is about as magisterial an account of "the agency's" 60 years as anyone has yet produced. More than that, it is a timely and vital contribution to one of the most fraught debates now roiling our bitterly divided capital: the correct role of the intelligence agencies and their proper relationship not only to the executive and legislative branches but also to the rule of law itself.
Clearly, Weiner's publisher realizes that: When the CIA announced it would this week release redacted accounts of its misconduct over the years -- the so-called family jewels -- this book's release was advanced to this month, from Aug. 7. It was a shrewd decision. The agency's familial gems turned out to be mostly paste -- at best, additional details concerning things already broadly known -- but "Legacy of Ashes," by contrast, fairly glitters with relevance.
Weiner, a New York Times reporter who covered the CIA for that paper during the 1990s, has been working on this book for at least 20 years. He's a superb reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1988 at the Philadelphia Inquirer for stories he did on the Pentagon's "black," or secret, budget. He turned that material into his first book, which was followed by what many people consider the definitive book on Soviet mole Aldrich H. Ames' devastating betrayal of the CIA.
The most remarkable and, for that matter, admirable thing about "Legacy of Ashes" is that it is based \o7entirely \f7on primary sources and on-the-record interviews. Nothing goes unattributed, and when the author does draw his conclusions -- which he does frequently and with refreshing clarity -- they have that muscular authority that only facts can create.
Those facts are drawn from multiple sources, including the author's exclusive access to the CIA's own numerous secret histories of its operations, from more than 50,000 documents -- many newly declassified -- in the archives of the agency, White House and State Department, from on-the-record interviews with 10 directors of central intelligence and from more than 300 interviews with current and former CIA agents and officials.
