The secret policemen's fall

Tim Weiner's The Legacy of Ashes reveals what the CIA really got up to in a fascinating account of their dirty dealings, says Chris Petit

Saturday August 11, 2007
The Guardian

Legacy of Ashes
by Tim Weiner
702pp, Allen Lane, £25

~snip~ Despite misreading nearly every global crisis, the agency acquired a shining reputation, thanks both to the public relations efforts of Dulles and its own "cold warrior" mystique of mission and crusade. But in Weiner's account the CIA emerges as a tawdry creation: part elite club, founded on arrogance and insufficient geography, part quasi-criminal racket operating outside the laws of the United States, barred only from behaving like a secret police force inside the US, which still didn't prevent it from conducting a seven-year domestic surveillance operation in the 1960s codenamed Chaos. ~snip~

Weiner exposes a history of bribery, coercion and brute force. In Iran, the agency rented the allegiances of soldiers and street mobs, faking violent unrest in order to stage a coup in 1953, the consequences of which are still apparent today. It helped create the secret police of Cambodia, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Iran, Iraq, Laos, Peru, the Philippines, South Korea, South Vietnam and Thailand. It established a "bomb school" in Los Fresnos, Texas, whose graduates included future leaders of death squads in Honduras and El Salvador. Back home in its Langley headquarters it was often out of control, embattled and mistrusted by the White House, in crisis but resistant to change and in thrall to its own myths.

The Nixon administration was the first to treat intelligence as simply another form of politics, Nixon's line being if it's secret, it's legal. Under Reagan, intelligence became a business. CIA head William Casey sidestepped Congress and worked round the law to find private financiers for his grand designs, which mostly boiled down to running guns to warlords. To Casey, espionage was just another kind of deal, hence the scandal of Iran-Contra, which laundered profits from illegal weapons sales into covert operations in Central America. Casey's successor Bob Gates noted, "The clandestine service is the heart and soul of the agency. It is also the part that can land you in jail."

CIA intelligence, once described as a $40bn pile of crap, produced "slam dunk" evidence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Since 9/11 it has been eclipsed by the Pentagon and relegated to acting as a global military police force in the war on terror. In the security boom following 9/11, it was further weakened by the privatisation of great chunks of the clandestine service. Corporate clones of the CIA, run by ex-CIA men retaining CIA access and much better paid than their governmental counterparts, began appearing all over Washington. By 2006 around half the officers in Baghdad and at the new National Counterterrorism Centre were contract employees, and Lockheed Martin, the nation's biggest military contractor, was posting ads for "counterterrorism analysts" to interrogate Guantánamo detainees. ~snip~

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2146060,00.html