BuzzFlash Reviews

BUZZFLASH REVIEWS

Honestly, we haven't read the book, but Tom Engelhardt of Tom Dispatch, an unassailable source, is raving about it (and it's headed for bestseller status, by the way).

In a July 24th column, Engelhardt writes:

"The secret prison was set up on a secure U.S. Naval base outside the U.S. and so beyond the slightest recourse to legal oversight. It was there that the CIA clandestinely brought its "suspects" to be interrogated, abused, and tortured.

That description might indeed sound like Guantanamo 2002, but think again. According to New York Times reporter Tim Weiner's new history of the Central Intelligence Agency, Legacy of Ashes -- a remarkable treasure trove of grim and startling information you hadn't known before -- this actually happened first in the Panama Canal Zone in the early 1950s. It was there, as well as at two secret prisons located in Germany and Japan, the defeated Axis powers (and not, in those days, in Thailand or Rumania), that the CIA brought questionable double agents for "secret experiments" in harsh interrogation, "using techniques on the edge of torture, drug-induced mind control, and brainwashing." This was but a small part of "Project Artichoke," a 15-year, multi-billion dollar "search by the CIA for ways to control the human mind."

No book in recent memory has done such a superb job of illuminating the roiling, disastrous, thoroughly destructive path through history of America's top covert-operations agency over the last six decades, what Chalmers Johnson has often called "the president's private army." Johnson himself was an outside consultant for the CIA from 1967 to 1973 until, as he writes in his latest book Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (the third volume of his Blowback Trilogy), "this consulting function was abolished by [National Security Advisor Henry] Kissinger and [CIA Director James] Schlesinger during [President Richard] Nixon's second term precisely because they did not want outsiders interfering with their ability to tell the president what to think." On first arrival at the Agency's "campus" in Langley, Virginia, Johnson reminds us, Schlesinger, in the typically highhanded fashion of CIA heads, immediately announced, "I am here to see that you guys don't screw Richard Nixon." Think of CIA Directors George Tenet or Porter Goss and George Bush and you're back in our present age."

Heck, at 720 pages, you can puddle jump through the twisted legacy of the CIA until you have time to read the whole thing!

It might be hard to handle all the gruesome doings of our "intelligence agency" in one sitting anyway.

“This is a fascinating, deeply scary book. With prodigious reporting and on-the-record sources, Tim Weiner shows why the CIA has done so poorly in traditional intelligence. It’s a riveting tale and also a warning. America must develop the ability—and the will—to know and face the facts about the world.”

-—Walter Isaacson, author of Benjamin Franklin: An American Life and Einstein: His Life and Universe

Chalmers Johnson, a prodigious chronicler of the failed attempt to establish an American Empire, notes of the book:

"Weiner, a New York Times correspondent, has been working on Legacy of Ashes for 20 years. He has read over 50,000 government documents, mostly from the CIA, the White House, and the State Department. He was instrumental in causing the CIA Records Search Technology (CREST) program of the National Archives to declassify many of them, particularly in 2005 and 2006. He has read more than 2,000 oral histories of American intelligence officers, soldiers, and diplomats and has himself conducted more than 300 on-the-record interviews with current and past CIA officers, including ten former directors of central intelligence. Truly exceptional among authors of books on the CIA, he makes the following claim: "This book is on the record -- no anonymous sources, no blind quotations, no hearsay."

Weiner's history contains 154 pages of end-notes keyed to comments in the text. (Numbered notes and standard scholarly citations would have been preferable, as well as an annotated bibliography providing information on where documents could be found; but what he has done is still light-years ahead of competing works.) These notes contain extensive verbatim quotations from documents, interviews, and oral histories. Weiner also observes: "The CIA has reneged on pledges made by three consecutive directors of central intelligence –- [Robert] Gates, [James] Woolsey, and [John] Deutch -- to declassify records on nine major covert actions: France and Italy in the 1940s and 1950s; North Korea in the 1950s; Iran in 1953; Indonesia in 1958; Tibet in the 1950s and 1960s; and the Congo, the Dominican Republic, and Laos in the 1960s." He is nonetheless able to supply key details on each of these operations from unofficial, but fully identified, sources."

Johnson, in a book review posted on TomDisptach.com, effusively praises the books and notes its detail, occasionally even darkly comical:

"Perhaps the most comical of all CIA clandestine activities -- unfortunately all too typical of its covert operations over the last 60 years -- was the spying it did in 1994 on the newly appointed American ambassador to Guatemala, Marilyn McAfee, who sought to promote policies of human rights and justice in that country. Loyal to the murderous Guatemalan intelligence service, the CIA had bugged her bedroom and picked up sounds that led their agents to conclude that the ambassador was having a lesbian love affair with her secretary, Carol Murphy. The CIA station chief "recorded her cooing endearments to Murphy." The agency spread the word in Washington that the liberal ambassador was a lesbian without realizing that "Murphy" was also the name of her two-year-old black standard poodle. The bug in her bedroom had recorded her petting her dog. She was actually a married woman from a conservative family."

You might not know it, but there is an "oversight board" that exists, ostensibly to oversee wretched excesses of the CIA. But under Bush it has been entirely neutered:

"However, on July 15, 2007, John Solomon of the Washington Post reported that, for the first five-and-a-half years of the Bush administration, the Intelligence Oversight Board did nothing -- no investigations, no reports, no questioning of CIA officials. It evidently found no reason to inquire into the interrogation methods Agency operatives employed at secret prisons or the transfer of captives to countries that use torture, or domestic wiretapping not warranted by a federal court."

There are no checks on balances on Bush and Cheney's rogue government, none whatsoever it appears.


BUZZFLASH REVIEWS