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 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

“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

“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

“As the technology of espionage expanded its horizons, the CIA’s vision grew more and more myopic. Spy satellites enabled it to count Soviet weapons. They did not deliver the crucial information that communism was crumbling. The CIA’s foremost experts never saw the enemy until after the cold war was over.”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“The supreme goal of the CIA during the cold war was to steal Soviet secrets by recruiting spies, but the CIA never possessed a single one who had deep insight into the workings of the Kremlin. The number of Soviet spies with important information to reveal—all of them volunteers, not recruits—could be counted on the fingers of two hands. And all of them died, captured and executed by Moscow. Almost all had been betrayed by officers of the CIA’s Soviet division who were spying for the other side, under Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush. Under Reagan, the CIA set off on misconceived third-world missions, selling arms to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards to finance a war in Central America, breaking the law and squandering what trust remained reposed in it. More grievously, it missed the fatal weakness of its main enemy.”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“The CIA’s covert operations were by and large blind stabs in the dark. The agency’s only course was to learn by doing—by making mistakes in battle. The CIA then concealed its failures abroad, lying to Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy. It told those lies to preserve its standing in Washington. The truth, said Don Gregg, a skilled cold-war station chief, was that the agency at the height of its powers had a great reputation and a terrible record.”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“The agency’s ranks were filled with thousands of patriotic Americans in the 1950s. Many were brave and battle-hardened. Some had wisdom. Few really knew the enemy. Where understanding failed, presidents ordered the CIA to change the course of history through covert action. “The conduct of political and psychological warfare in peacetime was a new art,” wrote Gerald Miller, then the CIA’s covert-operations chief for Western Europe.”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“Only weeks before, McMahon had beaten back an attempt by the National Security Council staff to violate a presidential ban on political assassinations. “We received a draft secret executive order telling us to go knock off terrorists in pre-emptive strikes,” McMahon recalled. “I told our folks to send it back and tell them: ‘When the President revokes the executive order which precludes CIA from assassinations, then we’ll take this on.’ That hit the guys on the NSC staff. They went ballistic.”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“It is not the critic who counts, nor the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood. Richard Nixon had quoted the same speech the day before”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“John F. Kennedy publicly proclaimed—in a November 1961 interview with Khrushchev’s son-in-law, the editor of Izvestia—that “the United States supports the idea that every people shall have the right to make a free choice as to the kind of government they want.” Cheddi Jagan might be “a Marxist,” he said, “but the United States doesn’t object, because that choice was made by an honest election, which he won.” But Kennedy decided to use the CIA to depose him.”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“On August 10, John McCone, Robert Kennedy, and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara met in Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s ornate conference room on the seventh floor of the State Department. The subject was Cuba. McCone remembered “a suggestion being made to liquidate top people in the Castro regime,” including Castro and his brother Raul, the Cuban defense minister, who had just returned from a weapons-buying trip to Moscow. He found the idea abhorrent. The director saw a greater danger ahead. He predicted that the Soviet Union was going to give Castro nuclear weapons—medium-range ballistic missiles capable of striking the United States. He had been worrying about that possibility for more than four months. He had no intelligence, nothing to go on save gut instinct. McCone was the only one who saw the threat clearly. “If I were Khrushchev,” he said, “I’d put offensive missiles in Cuba. Then I’d bang my shoe on the desk and say to the United States, ‘How do you like looking down the end of a gun barrel for a change? Now, let’s talk about Berlin and any other subject that I choose.’” No one seems to have believed him. “The experts unanimously and adamantly agreed that this was beyond the realm of possibility,” notes an agency history of McCone’s years. “He stood absolutely alone.”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“On August 8, McCone met the president at the White House to discuss the wisdom of dropping hundreds of Chinese Nationalist soldiers into Mao’s China. The president had approved the paramilitary operation. McCone was dubious. Mao had surface-to-air missiles, and the last U-2 flight that the CIA had sent over the Chinese mainland, McCone told the president, had been spotted and tracked by Chinese communist radars twelve minutes after takeoff from Taiwan. “That’s humorous,” said Kennedy’s national-security aide, Michael Forrestal, the son of the late defense secretary. “We’ll give the President another U-2 disaster.” And what would the cover story be this time? the president joked. Everyone laughed. One month after this meeting, Mao’s forces shot down a U-2 over China.”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“It took eleven weeks to organize the hunt for Osama bin Laden. When that hunt began in earnest, I was in eastern Afghanistan, in and around Jalalabad, where I had traveled on five trips over the years. An old acquaintance named Haji Abdul Qadir had just reclaimed his post as the provincial governor, two days after the fall of the Taliban. Haji Qadir was an exemplar of Afghan democracy. A well-educated and highly cultured Pathan tribal leader in his early sixties, a wealthy dealer in opium and weapons and other basic staples of the Afghan economy, he had been a CIA-supported commander in the fight against the Soviet occupation, the governor of his province from 1992 to 1996, and a close associate of the Taliban in their time. He personally welcomed Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan and helped him establish a compound outside Jalalabad. Now he welcomed the American occupation. Haji Qadir was a good host. We walked in the gardens of the governor’s palace, through swayback palms and feathery tamarisks. He was expecting a visit from his American friends any day now, and he was looking forward to the renewal of old ties and the ritual exchange of cash for information.”
― 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