ANGELO M. CODEVILLA: Ministry of Truth Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
Weiner, Tim
BOOKS IN REVIEW included inaccurate battlefield reports, gross exaggerations of both the size of the Buddhist population in Vietnam and government violence against the protesters, and false...
...Worse yet was their explanation for doing it...
...But the Navy cryptologists got it right, and in good time...
...The agency gave the White House information manipulated by Moscow—and deliberately concealed the fact...
...Despite many shortcomings, Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes points out again and again to audiences that need to hear it that, with some exceptions, the CIA has never been a “secret empire,” but always a Wizard of Oz, a gaggle of sorcerers’ apprentices of pretentious poseurs...
...In China the Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek had manipulated the OSS to his own ends...
...Senate Staff member dealing with oversight of the intelligence services...
...Uncritically, he accepts old CIA saws, such as that failure to warn Hawaii that the Japanese were coming on December 7 was due to lack of a central agency that could connect the dots...
...Any book with as relentless a catalogue of mistakes as this one invites the question of hindsight...
...The New York Times has not reviewed Moyar’s book, even though it is a major work that makes clear that this is not the case...
...The almost hopeless compromise of OSS personnel makes their use as a secret intelligence agency in the postwar world inconceivable...
...Yet even after Diem’s demise, Moyar makes clear that the U.S...
...Ministry of Truth T HIS BOOK IS MUST READING, if only because of page 450...
...In truth, opinion was more divided back in Washington...
...Moyar’s scholarship indicates, however, that the Chinese dreaded another Korea even more than the Americans did (emboldened by U.S...
...Ames, whom Weiner interviewed in jail, had told him he “thought it absurd to say that the Soviet threat to the United States was immense and growing...
...They are standard at the CIA for the same reason they are standard in the Establishment’s other cloistered parts, academe, the mainstream media, and Hollywood...
...they should engage Moyar instead of ignoring him...
...Rather, the paucity of real sources that results from the kinds of officers the CIA puts in the field leads it to take what it can get and call it good...
...For eight years… the senior CIA officers responsible for these reports had known that some of their sources were controlled by Russian intelligence...
...It is unlikely Vietnam can teach us much, though, if our understanding of the conflict is still so incomplete...
...still had many options in 1964 and 1965...
...Secrecy has guarded incompetence...
...reluctance to take more aggressive action against North Vietnam in 1964-65, fearing that it would provoke the Chinese into sending combat forces and create another Korea...
...Weiner realizes that the U.S...
...Triumph Forsaken throws down a mighty challenge to orthodox historians...
...timidity, they would eventually send divisions to protect North Vietnam...
...Flash: The commander of Soviet forces in the Balkans was toasting the coming fall of Istanbul...
...His description of the analytical process under Director Hoyt Vandenberg in 1946 would fit the process that produced the images that presidents got of the Soviet Union/Russia in the 1990s and of Iraq in our time: “It was impossible to determine whether the warnings were true, but they went up the chain of command regardless...
...Announcing The American Spectator’s Promoting Excellence in Journalism by Training the Next Generation of Writers & Journalists Young Training Program provides developing effective writing and will be published in TAS and Spectator.org...
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...The elimination of Diem is the original sin in this book, and as Moyar would have it, of the entire Vietnam War, coloring everything that followed...
...BOOKS IN REVIEW included inaccurate battlefield reports, gross exaggerations of both the size of the Buddhist population in Vietnam and government violence against the protesters, and false reports of dissension within the army’s officer corps...
...Because Aldrich Ames, then chief of counterintelligence for CIA’s Soviet/East Europe division, told the Russians who our agents among them were, thus turning them into channels of disinformation, and also certified as credi ble the agents the KGB sent our way, he enabled the Russians to use the CIA to manipulate the minds of Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA By Tim Weiner (DOUBLEDAY, 702 PAGES, $27.95) Reviewed by Angelo M. Codevilla Angelo M. Codevilla is professor of international relations at Boston University and a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute...
...But Moyar might have acknowledged history’s tragic dimension by noting the difficulty of making high-stakes judgments in real time, hindered by imperfect information and painful memories of the recent past...
...That is what the intelligence community exists to do,” Hitz said...
...Much like the CIA, Weiner does not treat his sources critically...
...He decided he knew better...
...Flash: A drunken Soviet officer boasted that Russia would strike without warning...
...Indeed, the CIA’s history consists disproportionately of compromised personnel and operations—and of allergic rejection of scrupulosity about sources...
...In our own time, of course, Vietnam is the painful recent past, and the orthodox view has colored many interpretations of our current difficulties in Iraq...
...Program emphasis includes news writing, investigative journalism, writing and editing for the e-news media, and skills...
...To learn how you can qualify to participate, write: Young Journalism Program, c/o The American Spectator 1611 North Kent St., Ste...
...His work, Moyar argues, affected the generals’ confidence in Diem, especially since they saw the Times as the organ of the American government’s position...
...But until Tim Weiner, longtime reporter for the New York Times, got Hitz to put it on the record, even those inured to the CIA’s faults, including myself, had only marveled at how stupid it was for the CIA not to have noticed that the intelligence “take” coming from the Soviet Union was at odds with reality...
...I know what the Soviet Union is really all about, and I know what’s best for foreign policy and national security… and I’m going to act on that.’” In short, the spy now serving a life sentence in 74 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 2007 This line of argument recalls Dan Rather’s defense of his 2004 report on George W. Bush’s alleged misdeeds in the Air National Guard: Though the report’s particulars were false, the report itself pointed to the truth...
...To reveal that it had been delivering misinformation and disinformation would have been too embarrassing...
...Then there is the old nonsense about CIA money having turned Italians proAmerican in 1948, as well as dark hints that the U.S...
...Nor is its current practice of swallowing whole what the intelligence services of Arab countries tell it about al Qaeda’s responsibility for terrorism and their own innocence unprecedented...
...The fault lay in top officials, who tergiversated and then sent the warning by a routine message that survived the Japanese attack sitting in Pearl Harbor’s inbox...
...I had not imagined that the CIA’s highest officials knew that the “stuff ” was bogus, and solitary confinement was not so far in his thinking from the CIA’s mainstream: We know best, and are entitled to make sure our good views prevail...
...T HIS IS LESS A HISTORY THAN the sewing together of interviews, in some cases backed by documents...
...True enough...
...Orthodox Vietnam historians, Moyar writes, tend to dismiss revisionists as politically motivated, since the issues surrounding the war, in their view, have long since been settled...
...There, the author relates his interview with Fred Hitz, formerly the CIA’s inspector general, about Hitz’s 1994 investigation of how the CIA had dealt with the fact that, between 1986 and 1994, all of its agent network in the Soviet Union/Russia had been controlled by the Russians...
...sorely missed the guidance of an Eisenhower, whose strength and judgment were not nearly so common as he made them appear...
...The Japanese embassy in Lisbon had discovered the plans of OSS officers to steal its code books—and as a consequence the Japanese changed their codes [the Navy had broken them], which “resulted in a complete blackout of vital mil BOOKS IN REVIEW itary information” in the summer of 1943…“How many American lives in the Pacific represent the cost of this stupidity on the part of OSS is unknown...
...Such arguments make sense only to those who feel entitled to make them...
...Lyndon Johnson later said of Halberstam, “That man is a traitor… they give Pulitzer Prizes to traitors nowadays...
...But at the CIA, the sense of entitlement to arbitrage truth and goodness is bolstered by the conviction that “we” have more information than anybody else...
...He knew what was real and what was not...
...intelligence community’s tendency to accept, masticate, and embellish rumors with assumptions stems from basic ignorance...
...The impression (formerly universal but ever less widespread) that the CIA is the trove of the world’s secrets is as inaccurate as it has been harmful...
...Johnson, however, frittered away precious time with “proportionate” responses to the North’s increased belligerence, and the Communists began to take the president at his word that he wanted “no wider war...
...As they ought to know, truth is its own reward, but it can also be damn practical...
...Johnson spoke with another general in 1965— former president Dwight Eisenhower, who gave him prescient advice: “When you go into a place merely to hold sections or enclaves,” he said, “you are paying a price and not winning.… This is a war, and as long as [the North Vietnamese] are putting men down there, my advice is ‘do what you have to do!’” The old general disliked the idea of limited war, and preferred to “go after the head of the snake instead of the tail...
...All this, bad enough, was clear to the world in 1994...
...Never mind that the facts in this or that report are not, strictly speaking, accurate, and never mind the sources’ agendas...
...By then, allies like General Marjadi of Indonesia, among others, had urged him along, telling him that “Asia respects power, and has no respect for weakness or for strong people afraid to act...
...Only in July 1965 did he feel forced to make his move...
...If the South Vietnamese suffered without Diem, the U.S...
...He made that decision himself,” Hitz said...
...Johnson’s concerns, Moyar writes, were “based not on real evidence of China’s current intentions and capabilities, but rather on a general fear of history repeating itself and the recognition that an enemy… can react in unpredictable ways...
...Weiner recalls instance after instance, decade after decade, in every corner of the globe, in which the CIA got information from persons it thought were working for it, but were actually working for Soviets, Romanians, East Germans, Cubans, etc...
...Weiner cites a 1945 report (kept secret until the 1990s) that was commissioned by FDR on the wartime Office of Strategic Services, where the CIA’s founding generation got its start: British intelligence commanders regarded American spies “as putty in their hands...
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...pretended to three presidents that it was for real...
...The fact that the reporting had come from agents of deception meant nothing...
...SEPTEMBER 2007 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 73 BOOKS IN REVIEW Presidents Reagan, Bush, and Clinton, as well as of their secretaries of state and defense...
...Kennedy, who comes off as weak and not in charge of policy, was despondent when he got news of Diem’s murder...
...Johnson was haunted by Douglas MacArthur’s erroneous prediction that the Chinese would not get into the Korean fighting...
...Flash: Stalin was prepared to invade Turkey...
...Ninety-five of these tainted reports warped American perceptions of the major military and political developments in Moscow.… They distorted America’s ability to understand what was going on in Moscow.… The most senior CIA official responsible for these reports insisted—as Ames had done—that he knew best...
...He previously served as a U.S...
...What really matters, what makes the difference between a good report and a bad one, between one that may be true in the narrow sense but false in the deepest sense and one that is truly good though consisting of imperfect elements, is whether it pushes America and history in the right direction...
...901 Arlington, VA 22209 SEPTEMBER 2007 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 75...
...Paraphrasing and quoting Hitz, Weiner writes: [The “blue border” reports] were signed by the director of central intelligence and sent to the President, the Secretary of Defense, and the Secretary of State...
...Germany’s spies had penetrated OSS operations all over Europe and North Africa...
...Moyar discusses U.S...
Vol. 40 • September 2007 • No. 7
