Appreciation: Weiner on the CIA

Say this for Cheney. When he set out to ignore the intelligence of the CIA on Iraq, he had good practical justification behind him. With one dramatic exception (mentioned below) the fact is that the CIA had missed ever intelligence call since World War II.

This is one lesson tht Tim Weiner does not draw from his long, shambolic, somewhat misnamed but resoundingly fashionable Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA (2007).

Not that there is anything particularly appropriate about the “Legacy of Ashes” part: Weiner makes a good case for the proposition that the CIA has, through a toxic mixtue of arrogance, incompetence and organizational pathology, more or less worked itself out of a job.

Compulsive and instructive reading, but at the end of the day, not really “A History of the CIA.” The problem begins with the notion of “intelligence” itself, as the CIA may or may not have defined it. There are at least three possible meanings:

• The tedious and unending search for data, and the attempt to process same.
• As a distinguishable subset, the sometimes tense and dramatic campaign to steal information, to expand or enrich the the more general inquiry.
• Dirty tricks: rigging elections, overthrowing governments, and all the attendant business of so many “spy stories.
  

What Weiner has achieved is a breezy, entertaining jog-trot through the final category above (dirty tricks), with somewhat more disjointed comments, insights, etc., about the second. He’s got some stuff about the first, but only incidental, indirect—hey, I said it was tedious.

Weiner makes it clear that so far as “gathering intelligence” goes—either via route #1 or route #2—we are really pretty awful. As far as “dirty tricks” goes, the record is more complicated. We clearly had some short-term “successes”—overthrew (or helped to overthrow) Mossadegh in Iran, Arbenz in Guatamala, Allende in Chile (to name the more obvious examples—Diem in Viet Nam was more of a State Department job)—but many of these short-term “successes” can be understood in retrospect as tactical successes only, strategic failures (think “Japanese win at Pearl Harbor”). We also, bye the bye, slipped hundreds, perhaps thousands, of agents, into enemy territory to “spy: for us—only to have them captured or killed, sometimes moments after they touched the ground. But they are dead, and so not a powerful lobby.

Weiner also offers a few tantalizing—but sadly transitory and disjointed—insights into larger issues in intelligence. For example, he suggests that one reason the CIA so vastly overestimated Soviet economic strength is that it spent all its time looking at military targets (on directions of our military) and for economic data, pretty much took the Soviets at their word. As another, he suggests that for all of (whatever) success we may have had in tracking down information about what the Soviets had done, we were never good at all at sorting out their purposes—okay, so they had all those rockets; did they intend to use them? And where? And when?

All this suggests that what we can really use is something vastly more ambitious than Weiner’s already ambitious undertaking—namely, a more thorough analytic assessment of what intelligence can be expected to do, and how it can accomplish the job. This would require a sifting and resifting of the raw data that Weiner has assembled—plus a lot more about the CIA that he has not assembled here, plus all that stuff about intelligence operation sin the Defense Department or the State Department or the National Security Agency. A tall order: maybe an agenda for Weiner’s next book.

Update: Oops, I forgot to mention the promised "exception." Anyway: the CIA failed to anticipate the Korean War, the Chinese counteroffensive, the chances of a Hungarian counterrevolution, the Cuban missile crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the collapse of the Soviet Union--just to hit the high spots. And they were wrong about WMD in Iraq in 1991: specifically, they failed to see how far along the Iraqis were in their quest for the bomb. By Weiner's count, they were right exactly once: they did anticipate 1967 Arab-Israeli war. But the Israelis were our friends--for my money, getting a heads-up whisper from them doesn't quite count as an espionage victory at all.