TIM WEINER’S well-written but polemical history of the CIA seeks to demonstrate that its first 60 years consist of a virtually unbroken run of failures – a “legacy of ashes”.

The positive part of the agency’s record is brushed aside. Weiner grudgingly acknowledges, for example, the striking successes of 21st-century CIA operations (in alliance with British Intelligence) in halting nuclear proliferation by the hitherto dangerously successful A. Q. Khan network and persuading Colonel Gaddafi to abandon his nuclear ambitions. Legacy of Ashes, however, devotes only one sentence to these operations, before moving on to excoriate further failures in much greater detail.

Many of the complex problems faced by the CIA since its foundation in 1947 come from the fact that few presidents have grasped how to make constructive use of it. Harry Truman was initially bemused by the very idea of US foreign intelligence. His White House lunch to inaugurate the Central Intelligence Group (predecessor of the CIA) was probably the most bizarre in presidential history. Truman presented each guest with a black cloak, black hat and wooden dagger, then stuck a large moustache on the upper lip of his chief of staff.

His successor, Dwight Eisenhower, had a far better grasp of intelligence, thanks to his wartime experience as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. The exploits of resistance movements behind enemy lines, however, had given him an exaggerated notion of what CIA-backed paramilitary operations could – and should – achieve in peacetime. Hence the disastrous expansion in the 1950s of “covert action” (secret operations that sought to influence events rather than collect intelligence), culminating in 1961 in the comic-opera CIA-backed landing at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba, in a futile attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro. Like the Bay of Pigs and subsequent attempts to assassinate Castro, the most outrageous of the CIA’s covert actions were authorised, if not instigated, by the White House.

Weiner quotes the succinct definition of the agency’s main Cold War mission by Richard Helms, its head (DCI) from 1966-73: “To beat the goddam Russians!” A balanced understanding of the CIA’s record thus requires a serious examination of the KGB operations that it set out to defeat. Legacy of Ashesdoes not provide it. At times it resembles a history of Allied operations in the Second World War that pays little attention to the deployment of enemy forces.

By the time that the CIA was founded, Soviet Intelligence had used covert action on a huge scale to rig elections and destroy opposition in the newly established Soviet Bloc. It was largely in reaction to such operations by the KGB that a secret inquiry ordered by Eisenhower reached the alarming conclusion that “long-standing American concepts of ‘fair play’ must be reconsidered. We must develop effective espionage and counter-espionage services, and must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated and more effective methods than those used against us.”

Legacy of Ashes fails to do justice to the CIA’s role, despite its excessive use of covert action, in preventing the Cold War turning hot. It took the agency’s innovative U2 spy-plane programme, and the intelligence that it provided, to convince a fearful Washington that Moscow’s strategic bomber and nuclear missile forces were not outstripping its own.

And it was the U2 that, in 1962, alerted the White House to the construction of Soviet missile sites in Cuba before they became operational, thus giving President Kennedy the time to find a peaceful resolution to the most dangerous crisis of the Cold War.

Weiner acknowledges the role of the DCI, John McCone, as the clearest thinker in the crisis, but fails to give sufficient credit to the CIA as a whole, which on this occasion quite outclassed the KGB.

For all its flaws, Legacy of Ashes contains some fascinating material – much drawn from on-the-record interviews with ten former DCIs and other retired intelligence officers. Weiner shows, for example, that President Clinton’s many strengths did not include management of the intelligence community.

His first DCI, James Woolsey, was rung up 15 minutes before his appointment was to be announced by the President-elect’s press secretary and addressed as “Admiral”. Woolsey explained that he had never risen above army captain. “Whoops,” came the reply. “We’d better change the press release.”

Over the next two years, Woolsey met Clinton only twice – an all-time low in the history of the DCI’s access to the President. During these same years, Weiner claims, on plausible evidence, Clinton “ordered up dozens of covert-action proposals”. When Woolsey resigned, Clinton found it difficult to find others willing to be DCI.

In sum, Legacy of Ashesis a readable but disappointing book by a writer of obvious talent. Waiting in the wings is a new generation of less polemical intelligence historians with a greater capacity for balanced interpretation of the CIA’s record. Due this month is an outstanding work by the young Canadian Kristian Gustafson, Hostile Intent, which lays to rest a number of myths about CIA operations in Chile. I recommend it as a corrective to Legacy of Ashes.

LEGACY OF ASHES: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner

Allen Lane, £25; 720pp

Buy the book here for £22.50 (free p&p)

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