Richard Dearlove wrote the infamous 2002 Downing Street Memo, which was leaked in 2004, published in 2005, and called by Ray McGovern, a twenty-seven-year veteran of the CIA, "the most explosive leak of the [Iraq] war."  --  On Saturday, Dearlove published in the Financial Times of London a book review of Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes, which takes the form of a refutation.  --  Dearlove charges that the 700-page volume is "a polemic that uses a fundamentalist style of argument — every fact is harnessed to a single theme — to demolish the myth of the CIA and its reputation.  In short, the work lacks subtlety of interpretation or analysis and risks losing what merit it has on account of its uncompromising bias."[1]  --  The best documented history of the CIA ever written doesn't have enough sources, according Dearlove.  --  There is, he asserts, "a whole hinterland of crucial source-related activity that never [emerges in the public domain]"; it is therefore suggested that we dismiss Weiner's devastating case against the CIA in favor of unknowable evidence held by... the intelligence agencies themselves.  --  Has this man never heard that no one is judge in their own cause?  --  Dearlove's review is a tendentious, self-serving analysis if there ever was one.  --  No doubt the former director of MI6, whose famous memo showed not only that the Bush administration had determined to go to war against Iraq in 2002, but also that the war itself began in earnest at the end of August 2002, six weeks before Congress approved military action against Iraq, by intensifying the bombing of Iraq in the hopes that Saddam Hussein would be provoked into some act that could be represented as a casus belli, knows more than Weiner about some aspects of the history of the CIA — how could he not? —, but that does not excuse his disingenuousness in failing even to mention Weiner book's real claim to fame:  its documentary basis.  --  Legacy of Ashes has more than 150 pages of notes, and is "the first history of the CIA compiled entirely from firsthand reporting and primary documents," to quote Weiner.  --  This alone is enough to refute Dearlove's claim that the book is not "serious."   --  NOTE:  Along with James Risen's State of War, Legacy of Ashes is one of the volumes that UFPPC's book discussion group, Digging Deeper, will take up beginning on Sept. 24....

1.

Weekend magazine

Non-fiction

THE PLOT THICKENS
By Richard Dearlove

Financial Times (UK)
September 22, 2007

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/fb7c724e-68a3-11dc-b475-0000779fd2ac.html

[Review of Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner. Allen Lane £25, 720 pages. FT bookshop price: £20. (Published by Doubleday in U.S.)]

If you are disposed to think badly of the CIA then Tim Weiner's book is for you. It is written to confirm your prejudice and give it historical substance. However, if your interest is in serious intelligence history, a coming subject in universities on both sides of the Atlantic, then "the history of the CIA" that Legacy of Ashes claims to be should be approached with caution.

Weiner himself warns you. His introductory notes are clear about his thesis -- that the CIA "misapprehended the intentions and capabilities of our enemies, miscalculated the strength of Communism, and misjudged the threat of terrorism." This is a polemic that uses a fundamentalist style of argument -- every fact is harnessed to a single theme -- to demolish the myth of the CIA and its reputation. In short, the work lacks subtlety of interpretation or analysis and risks losing what merit it has on account of its uncompromising bias.

Weiner, a Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times reporter, does understand the importance to any intelligence agency of its reputation and the power of the myth built around its known and supposed achievements. To survive and prosper it must, above all, be able to attract human intelligence sources with access to its primary requirements. Success depends not just on the skill of individual case officers, but on a complicated admixture of qualities within the agency, projected mainly through its reputation. Fortunately for the CIA, and by implication the intelligence services of its closer allies, Weiner's book will probably not be read by the Iranian, al-Qaeda, Russian, Chinese, and North Korean operatives who have at this moment, deep in their psyche, the germ of an intention to get themselves recruited by the CIA -- should they be asked in the right way, by the right person, at the right time. Making these difficult calls -- identifying those susceptible to recruitment, facilitating those who do offer themselves as sources -- is the core business of successful espionage. Weiner attempts no serious analysis of the CIA's performance and capabilities in this key area. He asserts that the CIA mostly cannot do it, and has neither done it often enough nor well enough.

Weiner's book is not really about CIA espionage. It touches on espionage only intermittently. What Weiner chronicles, and thoroughly, is the checkered history of U.S. covert action -- how every president since Truman has tried to use the CIA to pursue his own foreign policy priorities with minimal accountability to Congress. Weiner also describes how the CIA often operated in pursuit of very general presidential instructions, without control and in a manner that had a contrary impact on U.S. national security. In this context Weiner takes particular aim at the reputation of Allen Dulles, perhaps the CIA's most respected director, whom he sees as dangerously autonomous and lying without restraint when it was necessary to protect himself and the agency. Frank Wisner Sr., the first head of the clandestine service of the CIA, gets harsher treatment.

Weiner's thesis is that the CIA's preoccupation with covert action -- which was undertaken without due regard to the consequences, often poorly planned, and badly executed (certainly true of many of the examples we know about today) -- prevented the development of a sophisticated and successful espionage service able to produce for U.S. policy-makers a consistent flow of high-quality intelligence. Undoubtedly the CIA would have done better as an intelligence-producing agency if less of its energy and fewer of its resources had gone into covert action and more into source acquisition. The directors of the CIA as presidential appointees were mostly unlikely to make that switch. The few directors who did understand the problem were never in office long enough to make a profound difference. However, to write off the CIA's espionage performance as poor and irrelevant historically is misleading. How could someone as apparently well-informed as Weiner have got this wrong?

The answer seems to lie in the quotation from Racine's Britannicus with which the book opens: "There are no secrets that time does not reveal." For covert action this aphorism holds true. Large-scale covert adventures, designed to change the fate of countries and governments, by their very nature cannot remain secret for long; but the microcosmic world of recruited human sources is quite different.

Although important espionage cases may well emerge eventually into the public domain, there is a whole hinterland of crucial source-related activity that never does. Weiner shows no awareness of this and the passages that deal with espionage lack the authority of his accounts of covert action. His facts are shaky, incomplete, or plain wrong. Here are three examples, but there are many more: the passage about source codename Farewell (the French penetration of the KGB's Scientific and Technical Directorate) and the way the CIA responded to the case; his brief account of the first Gulf War; and the extraordinary claim that in the whole of the Cold War the CIA controlled precisely three agents who were able to provide secrets of lasting value on the Soviet military threat.

The crisis of confidence over the future shape and role of the American intelligence and security community caused by 9/11 and Iraq has stimulated many books and policy think pieces, the majority partisan and partial. Weiner's lack of rigor makes his book yet another example of this genre. There is no serious attempt to analyze the evolution of the CIA in a proper historical context, to contribute to an understanding of why decisions were taken at the time they were taken.

The reader is obliged to view events through a post-9/11 optic for hindsight. The historical short-circuits he uses are striking but unscholarly. For example, writing about the early 1950s, Weiner says: "These young officers had seen an intelligence service that was lying to itself . . . Allen Dulles suppressed their report. Nothing changed. Forty-three years later a congressional investigation concluded . . ." Weiner offers no new insights on events in Iraq or the CIA's involvement in "the global war on terror." He draws selectively on existing material to drive his final nails into the CIA's coffin.

If Weiner, in the tradition of investigative journalism, set out to write a book that would shock, he succeeded. That he assembles sufficient evidence to sustain his argument over more than 500 pages is laudable, and much of that material is disturbing. However, the very polemic of Legacy of Ashes threatens its welcome argument that there should be less adventuring on covert action and that the CIA should concentrate its clandestine resources on true espionage, the collection of intelligence from human sources.

As we mark the sixth anniversary of 9/11, two concerns are critical: what should be the role for U.S. intelligence, and for the CIA in particular, in the new world of 21st- century threats; and how the intelligence and security community should be controlled and organized with the complex checks and balances of the U.S. system of government. Weiner proffers no solutions himself -- more cerebral writers such as Richard Posner are striving to provide them.

Fortunately the CIA's legacy in this respect is not one of ashes -- there are in fact already solid foundations on which to rebuild, although it will take a decade of consistent clear-minded leadership to bring to maturity the intelligence capability that the U.S. now needs. However there is no quick political fix. Congress and the White House, please note.