Legacy of Ashes Quotes

“Intelligence fails because it is human, no stronger than the power of one mind to understand another. (480)”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“Washington was a small town run by people who believed that they lived in the center of the universe.”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“For sixty years tens of thousands of clandestine service officers have gathered only the barest threads of truly important intelligence—and that is the CIA’s deepest secret.”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“The CIA’s officers in Baghdad and in Washington tried to warn that the path the president was pursuing in Iraq was disastrous. They said the United States could not run a country it did not understand. Their words carried no weight at the White House. They were heresy in an administration whose policies were based on faith.”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“The CIA not only missed the invasion, it refused to admit that it had missed it. Why would anyone in his right mind invade Afghanistan, graveyard of conquerors for two thousand years? A lack of intelligence was not the cause of the failure. A lack of imagination was.”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“Never had so much intelligence meant so little. The conduct of the war had been set by a series of lies that the leaders of the United States told one another and the American people.”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“In the cold war, the CIA was condemned by the American left for what it did. In the war on terror, the CIA was attacked by the American right for what it could not do. The charge was incompetence, leveled by such men as Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld. Say what one may about their leadership, they knew from long experience what the reader now knows: the CIA was unable to fulfill its role as America’s intelligence service.”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“At the root of this failure of intelligence was “our national ignorance of Vietnamese history, society, and language,” he said.”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“By ordering the director of central intelligence to conduct a program of domestic surveillance, Kennedy set a precedent that Presidents Johnson, Nixon, and George W. Bush would follow.”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“The ability to represent failure as success would become an Agency tradition.”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“The myth about the CIA dated back to the Bay of Pigs: that all its successes were secret, that only its failures were trumpeted. The truth was that the CIA could not succeed without recruiting and sustaining skilled and daring officers and foreign agents. The agency failed daily at that mission, and to pretend otherwise was a delusion.”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“As a consequence of its cultural myopia, the CIA misread the world.”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“There weren’t any moderates left in the government of Iran.”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“To the CIA, everyone's an outsider.”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“Their attempts to make sense of the world had carried heat but little light.”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“the”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“intelligence.”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“remembered”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“The target was destroyed. But the CIA had misread its maps. The building was not Milosevic's military depot. It was the Chinese embassy.”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“The high command sent the order to kill Che at 11:50 a.m. “Guevara was executed with a burst of shots at 1:15 p.m.,” Rodriguez radioed to Tilton. “Guevara’s last words were: ‘Tell my wife to remarry and tell Fidel Castro that the Revolution will rise again in the Americas.’ To his executioner he said, ‘Remember, you are killing a man.”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“Успех нельзя разрекламировать: провалы нельзя ничем объяснить. Герои разведки нигде не выделяются и никем не воспеты.”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“Что касается работы в ЦРУ, он заявил: "Я ожидаю худшего и уверен, что не буду разочарован".”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“Традицией в Джорджтауне стал поздний воскресный приём. Главным "блюдом" были, естественно, спиртные напитки.”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“Многие из них понятия не имели, чем занимаются или что они, как предполагалось, должны делать. После приведения к присяге кто-то спросил Соерса, что тот хочет сейчас сделать. "Я хочу пойти домой", - ответил он.”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“The OSS had developed a uniquely American cadre of intelligence analysts, but Donovan and his star officer, Allen W. Dulles, were enthralled by espionage and sabotage, skills at which Americans were amateurs. Donovan depended on British intelligence to school his men in the dark arts. The bravest of the OSS, the ones who inspired legends, were the men who jumped behind enemy lines, running guns, blowing up bridges, plotting against the Nazis with the French and the Balkan resistance movements.”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“They were appalled by his idea of making a spy service out of a scattershot collection of Wall Street brokers, Ivy League eggheads, soldiers of fortune, ad men, news men, stunt men, second-story men, and con men.”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“Donovan told the president that he could learn the “capabilities, intentions and activities of foreign nations” while running “subversive operations abroad” against America’s enemies.”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“When the new Central Intelligence Agency arose from its ashes, Truman wanted it to serve him solely as a global news service, delivering daily bulletins. “It was not intended as a ‘Cloak & Dagger Outfit’!” he wrote. “It was intended merely as a center for keeping the President informed on what was going on in the world.” He insisted that he never wanted the CIA “to act as a spy organization. That was never the intention when it was organized.” His vision was subverted from the start.”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“I hope it may serve as a warning. No republic in history has lasted longer than three hundred years, and this nation may not long endure as a great power unless it finds the eyes to see things as they are in the world. That once was the mission of the Central Intelligence Agency.”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“almost every president, almost every Congress, and almost every director of central intelligence since the 1960s has proved incapable of grasping the mechanics of the CIA. Most have left the agency in worse shape than they found it. Their failures have handed future generations, in the words of President Eisenhower, “a legacy of ashes.” We are back where we began sixty years ago, in a state of disarray.”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA