How the CIA has become a danger to the national security of the United States

In the introduction chapter of Legacy of Ashes- The History of the CIA, the author Tim Wiener writes:

Intelligence is secret action aimed at understanding or changing what goes on abroad. President Dwight D Eisenhower called it a “distasteful but vital necessity”. A nation that wants to project its power beyond its borders needs to see over the horizon, to know what is coming, to prevent attacks against its people. It must anticipate surprise. Without a strong, smart, sharp intelligence service, presidents and generals alike can become blind and crippled. But throughout its history as a superpower, the United States has not had a service.

History, Edward Gibbon wrote in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, is “little more than the register of crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” The annals of the Central Intelligence Agency are filled with folly and misfortune, along with acts of bravery and cunning. They are replete with fleeting successes and long lasting failures abroad. They are marked by political battles and power struggles at home. The agency’s triumphs have saved some blood and treasure. Its mistakes have squandered both. They have proved fatal for legions of American soldiers and foreign agents; some three thousand Americans who died in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001; and three thousand more who have did since then in Iraq and Afghanistan. The one crime of lasting consequence has been the CIA’s inability to carry out its central mission; informing the president of what is happening in the world.

The book by Mr. Wiener which is based on three hundred interviews since 1987 with CIA officers and veterans, including ten directors of central intelligence, and more than three thousand oral histories of American intelligence officers, soldiers, and diplomats; is perhaps one of the foremost primary source documents of America’s most highly secretive and misunderstood government agencies.

The book however is not for everyone. Some of the biggest complaints from conservative readers are the author’s perceived liberal bias. Although most social conservatives have a hard time admitting that they might have been duped and manipulated by politicians such as Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and his son George W. Bush, the information presented in the book from a historical perspective makes these complaints weak and fruitless. The chapter “Ineffective and Scared” Wiener will force ideological supporters of the republican party and every American to begin to see how the agency began to become a political tool for policy makers wanting larger defense budgets and to protect their own government jobs with the agency, rather than an impartial agency providing intelligence to the President.

In the chapter, “Ineffective and Scared” Wiener recounts how President Gerald Ford and his closet supporters avoided a potentially damaging legal battle with Congress, which might have exposed the CIA’s sensitive covert and illegal operations such as foreign assassinations. Although Ford Administration officials like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld won a short-term political battle with members of Congress wanting to investigate the CIA’s failures of espionage and analysis, the long-term damage to the American republic were evident with the run up to the Iraq war in 2003.

In the backdrop of the political fallout from the Vietnam War and the CIA’s involvement in neighboring Laos and Thailand, Wiener writes in Legacy of ashes:

The CIA was sacked like a conquered city. Congressional committees were combing through its files, the Senate focusing on covert action, the house homing in on failures of espionage and analysis. …The White House feared political destruction. In the Oval Office on October 13, 1975, the president and his men met to weigh the damage.

Any document which officially shows American involvement in an assassination is a foreign policy disaster” Colby told the president. “They also want to go into sensitive covert operations” – like Laos. Would the White House go to the courts to stop Congress? “We are better off with a political confrontation than a legal one”, said Donald Rumsfeld. To prepare for that fight, the president shook up his cabinet at the end of October 1975.

Although the White House and the unethical actions of Ford advisors like Donald Rumsfeld who became the Sec of Defense and Dick Cheney, who became Ford’s Chief of Staff in the cabinet shake up, undermined the Constitutional balance of power,the inability of the Congress to use its constitutional authority to investigate the CIA paved the way for the today’s spineless and corrupt congress.

In addition to installing Cheney as Chief of Staff and Rumsfeld as Sec of Defense, the Ford cabinet shake up also saw the firing of Bill Cosby of the CIA and the appointment of George H.W. Bush as the new director of the CIA. Bush who was neither a general, an admiral nor a spy, knew almost nothing about intelligence. However, as a political consolation for not being offered to be Ford’s vice president in August 1974, the former two time Congressman and former head of the National Republican Committee during the Watergate years, was offered the position of the CIA.

At the time of the appointment however, Bush was not happy with the appointment and saw the appointment as a political graveyard.

Soon after getting the job at the CIA, Bush loved the secrecy, the camaraderie, the gadgetry, and the international intrigue the CIA offered. As Wiener shrewdly puns in his book, “

The CIA was Skull and Bones with a billion dollar budget.”

More to the point, Wiener also astutely writes:

“In less than eleven months at the helm, he bucked up morale at headquarters, defended the CIA against all critics, and deftly used the agency to build up a political base for his soaring ambitions.”

Throughout the books 50 chapters and 516 pages, Mr. Wiener, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and three other best selling books on secret national security programs, extensively documents how political leaders in America have used the CIA as a political tool rather than an agency for national security.

From private security corporations like Blackwater and DynCorp over billing the American tax payer to the perpetual war that the institutions of the ‘national security state apparatus’ require to maintain their relevance and justification, the silence of a national debate on maintaining an $80 billion intelligence apparatus while cuts in social security are being discussed is alarming.

Most Americans are not willing to recognize the recent failures of the CIA in predicting the collapse of the Soviet Union, the attacks on September 11, or the false information presented by George Tenet and the CIA that was used to justify the attack on Iraq in 2003. The book by Mr. Wiener makes a very strong case for the American people to demand that the CIA and other ‘national security state institutions’ be eliminated.

In a time of 12 percent unemployment in America, it is morally and ethically wrong that there is no serious discussion in the national dialogue about downsizing or capping the budget on institutions associated with the ‘national security state apparatus’, like the CIA.