Legacy of ashes
Subtitle: the history of the Central Intelligence Agency
By: by Tim Weiner.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 2007
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 702
ISBN-13: 9780385514453
Subjects: United States. -- Central Intelligence Agency -- History; Intelligence service -- United States -- History; United States -- History -- 1945-
Description: Here is the hidden history of the CIA: why eleven presidents and three generations of CIA officers have been unable to understand the world; why nearly every CIA director has left the agency in worse shape than he found it; and how these failures have profoundly jeopardized our national security. For sixty years, the CIA has managed to maintain a formidable reputation in spite of its terrible record, burying its blunders in top-secret archives. Its mission was to know the world--when it did not succeed, it set out to change the world instead. Now Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Weiner offers the first definitive history of the CIA, based on more than 50,000 documents, primarily from the archives of the CIA itself, and hundreds of interviews with CIA veterans, including ten Directors of Central Intelligence.--From publisher description.
Table of contents: title: Intelligence must be global and totalitarian; title: The logic of force; title: Fight fire with fire; title: The most secret thing; title: A rich blind man; title: They were suicide missions; title: A vast field of illusion; title: We have no plan; title: CIA's greatest single triumph; title: Bomb repeat bomb; title: And then well have a storm; title: We ran it in a different way; title: Wishful blindness; title: Ham-handed operations of all kinds; title: A very strange war; title: He was lying down and he was lying up; title: Nobody knew what to do; title: We had also fooled ourselves; title: We'd be delighted to trade those missiles; title: Hey, boss, we did a good job, didnt we?; title: I thought it was a conspiracy; title: An ominous drift; title: More courage than wisdom; title: The beginning of a long slide downwards; title: we knew then that we could not win the war; title: A political H-bomb; title: Track down the foreign communists; title: What the hell do those clowns do out there in Langley?; title: USG wants a military solution; title: We are going to catch a lot of hell; title: To change the concept of a secret service; title: A classic fascist ideal; title: The CIA would be destroyed; title: Saigon signing off; title: Ineffective and scared; title: He sought to overthrow their system; title: We were just plain asleep; title: A free-lance buccaneer; title: In a dangerous way; title: He was running a great risk; title: A con mans con man; title: To think the unthinkable; title: What are we going to do when the wall comes down?; title: We had no facts; title: Why in the world didn't we know?; title: We're in trouble; title: The threat could not be more real; title: A grave mistake; title: It's broken; title: The burial ceremony.