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Why Is 'Legacy Of Ashes: The History Of The CIA' Controversial?

2025-12-30 23:43:03

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Quincy

Reading Legacy of Ashes by Tim Weiner is like slowly peeling back the layers of an onion. As the book moves from chapter to chapter, each one is even more disturbing than the last. Instead of praiseworthy history of the CIA, Weiner gives us a searing, ruthless and entirely disappointing critique of the agency’s mistakes, particularly in terms of intelligence failures and botched coups. Most of the controversy about the book stems from Weiner’s unflinching tearing down of the mythology of the CIA and the agents who are typically portrayed as highly effective spies in movies.

I was also surprised by the number of declassified documents Weiner used as evidence for his accusations. After having read the claims against the CIA through the evidence of the CIA’s own records, it is hard to write off Weiner’s accusations as part of some ‘conspiracy theory’. That, of course, does not mean Weiner is entirely accurate, many would argue that his portrayal of the CIA’s history is overly pessimistic. But, for example, the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion or the foul Iran-Contra scandal certainly left me wondering whether ‘pessimistic’ is simply another word for ‘accurate’.

2026-01-01

Dylan

I picked up ‘Legacy of Ashes’ after a friend mentioned the ‘anti-American’ content of the book by Weiner. After having read it though, I can not classify the book in that simple manner. Rather it is a thorough accounting of the failures of the CIA and the way in which so much of their work was funded by tax payers. That Weiner includes in his book the details of the many assassinations and the countless propaganda efforts around the world is controversy enough. But the book is even more surprising in that it portrays the Cold War in a totally different light – as a series of mistakes and errors on the part of the CIA.

Other historians dispute Weiner’s book by pointing out some of the CIA’s successes, such as reading the Soviet’s decoder via reverse-engineering (not mentioned in the book). But that would undermine Weiner’s thesis of singular failure that inspires discomforting questions about US Foreign Policy. It’s like a thrilling spy novel in which the hero suffers a series of mishaps with his own shoelaces, except the hero is a very expensive agency of the US Government, and not just losing, but placing the stability of the world at risk.

2026-01-02

Flynn

I first heard of Weiner’s “Legacy of Ashes” in a professor’s description of it as “required reading for cynics” – a description that perfectly encapsulates the variance of opinion of Weiner’s book as either a scathing exposé that uncovers all of the greatest secrets of decades of covert operations with their full human impact, or as a bit of a one-sided hit piece that relies on a host of unsubstantiated sources to reinforce its credo that the CIA engages in actions that are detestable and that bring about terrible results with far reaching consequences – depending upon the reader’s perspective.

While reading the “brutal truth” about decades of covert operations by the CIA via the pages of Legacy of Ashes by Weiner is contrasting to watching Argo and reading of the heroic efforts of the CIA in rescuing Americans from Iran during the Iran Hostage Crisis, what is most fascinating to me is that Weiner also details in the book the numerous burned informants over the decades and even presidents of the United States who have been kept in the dark by the CIA. With Legacy of Ashes, Weiner writes of the “systemic rot” at the CIA over decades, and after reading the book I knew within hours that I would never look at history of the CIA the same way and that so much of it has been sanitized for the benefit of others.

2026-01-04

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