The Failings of the CIA

There is a very long and very informative essay on the failings of the CIA written by Spencer Ackerman in The Nation last summer. Here are some key bits:

But what the agency never acquired was competence. Its history is one of profound failure in two respects: first, operational failure, as its efforts at pulling the puppet strings of the world have usually ended up garroting its allies; second, the agency, fearful above all else of dismemberment by politicians outraged by its appalling track record, has lied with pathological consistency to Presidents and Congresses about its failed missions. An attempt to bump off the Syrian leadership in 1957 resulted in the interrogation and exposure of the CIA's Damascus chief, Roger Stone, within weeks. The agency fooled itself into believing a ragtag band of counterrevolutionaries could topple Fidel Castro in 1961, and followed up its disaster with years of aborted assassination attempts. A fear that the Iraqi coup of Nuri Said in 1958 would give the Soviets access to the Middle East's oil bounty led CIA area chief James Critchfield to sponsor a countercoup by an up-and-coming political force called the Baath Party.

...

From the beginning of the cold war, a consensus grew within the Truman Administration--entirely in secret--that success in shouldering the United States' newly assumed hegemonic responsibilities required a secret agency. The agency rose out of the ashes of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a ramshackle but romantic gentlemen's covert-action club assembled by Franklin Roosevelt to perform the dirty work of winning World War II. Truman didn't want to institutionalize the OSS for the cold war, yet the only people with experience in the shadows to staff the espionage organization he wanted were OSS veterans, and they quickly took charge of the nascent agency. These unsentimental elitists did not wait for Congress to authorize such an entity through legislation, since they were used to simply taking the money they needed and doing as they pleased. State Department appropriations became slush funds to finance disinformation efforts, bribe foreign officials and pay for three-martini lunches in European capitals. By the time Congress passed an act creating the CIA in 1949, the agency had already become a playground for paranoid alcoholics like Frank Wisner and James Jesus Angleton to tinker with the US-Soviet balance in Europe. The only ironclad provision in the agency's deliberately vague charter was that it could not spy on US citizens domestically. John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon ordered the CIA to violate that prohibition.

The CIA's successes were meager. After numerous "missteps"--which, in practice, meant getting local proxies killed--the CIA managed to oust Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala and Mohammed Mossadegh of Iran. Perhaps the agency's most competent director, Richard Helms, kept the criminally insane Angleton on as head of counterintelligence because he stopped the Soviets from penetrating the agency's highest levels. Meanwhile, Angleton told nearly every secret the agency had about its European assets to his drinking buddy, the Soviet agent Kim Philby. To call the CIA comically incompetent in its early years would be to diminish the considerable achievements of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. In 1950 William Wolf Weisband, an employee in the CIA's cryptanalysis division whose job was to translate intercepted Soviet communications, gave the agency's code-breaking secrets to the USSR. The catastrophe had more than one fateful consequence: in addition to what an official history later called "perhaps the most significant intelligence loss in U.S. history," it led to the creation of the National Security Agency, which under George W. Bush implemented a constellation of illegal, unconstitutional programs for warrantless domestic surveillance. It should be clear that even at that early date, CIA analysis was a sideshow to the much sexier realm of covert action.

...

Helms, as luminous a star as the CIA ever produced, was eventually convicted of lying to Congress under oath.

All this and more is recounted in Legacy of Ashes, a history of the agency written by New York Times reporter Tim Weiner. It is not hyperbolic to say that Weiner's book is the greatest ever written about the CIA. Weiner combed through mountains of declassified material and tracked down agency veterans at all levels to produce a complex, subtle and beautifully written history.

You really need to go read the whole article.