The people in charge of figuring out how to stop the bad guys from doing bad things to bad people (us) are pretty stupid and kinda nuts. That's according to journalist Tim Weiner (I'll wait til you get it out of your system) in a pretty thorough and interesting book that we'll call Legacy of Ashes.
Once again it's a non-fiction book. Get used to it you fiction-loving hussy. But in terms of non-fictionalityness, this book is pretty out there. Weiner does a great job of mixing interviews with the CIA's secret (now declassified, mostly) history, and the result is a slurry of crazy shit and failure, also known as a mocha.
Tracing its origins back to the OSS, Weiner shows how we were outfoxed from the beginning. Foreign spy agencies were able to infiltrate us routinely, and when they couldn't we telegraphed our moves like retards. And then we began to trust charlatans or frauds for our intelligence on matters ranging from Cuba to Korea to China to the Iron Curtain, and all the places in between (read: everywhere but Hoboken).
When Ike (Eisenhower, not Turner, though Ike Turner would play a critical role* in the CIA) put the agency together, he intended it to be just intelligence, but when you get a bunch of spies together, crazy shit is bound to happen, like causing coups, digging tunnels under Soviet embassies and trying to kill Castro by killing THE BEARD. Ninety-five percent of our shit failed, in some ways spectacularly. And where we succeeded, we killed a lot of people for no real reason.
If you're interested in Soviet-American relations and the history between the two, and ostensibly you are, you might want to glance at this. The recurring theme is misunderstanding. Whether it was deliberate (as with the Team B-oids) or accidental, the yanks thought the Soviets were about 50x more powerful than we were and about 10.6x crazier, when that wasn't always true. Paranoia was the name of the game at the agency.
As for Weiner's narrative, he mostly explains things in interesting detail. He's a bit dry but he tries to pace the CIA like a spy novel, introducing all sorts of nutty characters and including a bunch of interesting details. Though in some cases he is sparse with details when we'd like to know more. It's interesting how thick the book is in some sections but so devoid of any compelling facts, but that is a rare occurence in this book.
Overall I recommend it if you want to know what kind of people were spying on our enemies, real and imaginary, and what kind of psychos we had calling the shots. It's also a book every American should read (after "The Butter Battle Book") to gain an understanding as to how stupid the Cold War was even though it produced a bunch of cool Bond films and one great Rocky film and probably some other cool shit. Oh, yeah, the sickle and hammer. Dope logo, Ruskies!!
* Ike Turner actually had little to do with the CIA outside of "Operation: Beat Tina."
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