...entertaining here.

"When intelligence producers realize that there is no sense in forwarding to a consumer knowledge which does not correspond to his preconceptions, then intelligence is through." ~ Sherman Kent

Geoffery Wheatcroft | August 5

The Sunday Times - Over the past century, certain initials have become world-famous, with resonances either good, like the BBC, or loathesome: KGB, SS, IRA. Between those two extremes, the CIA is now at least as celebrated as any of the others. According to Tim Weiner, in the summer of 1953, Winston Churchill had never heard of it, but soon there would be few prime ministers, presidents or dictators who were unfamiliar with what the Central Intelligence Agency was, or what it did.

Created in 1946 out of the remnants of the wartime Office of Strategic Services (renowned for its derring-do and its ineptitude), the CIA expanded rapidly as the cold war developed. Harry Truman said that he never wanted it “to act as a spy organisation” rather than as a bureau collecting and collating intelligence in the broadest sense, and was even worried that he might be creating some kind of Gestapo. But then one of the themes of Weiner’s book is the awkward relationship between successive presidents and an overmighty agency. His very title is taken from Eisenhower, who complained that he had failed “to make sense of the agency”, and feared that he would leave his successor “a legacy of ashes”.

Towards the end of this long and well-informed if sometimes breathless book, Weiner observes that during the cold war the left damned the CIA for what it was doing, whereas in recent years the right has damned it for what it was failing to do. They both had a point. Few soothsayers have had such a poor record of prediction as the CIA: it didn’t foresee the Russian atomic bomb or the entry of China into the Korean war, and 50 years later, it had no inkling of the September 11 attacks.

A New York Times reporter, Weiner has researched the subject more fully than anyone before, making use of many hitherto unexplored archives. He portrays the senior officers of the CIA as Ivy League amateurs, too many of them neurotic, dipsomaniac, sexually eccentric or plain barking. Again and again, the CIA recklessly occasioned the demise of its operatives rather than its enemies, as enthusiasts were sent off to certain death in east Europe or China: “We’d drop these people in,” one CIA man said ruefully, “and we’d never hear from them again.”

"When intelligence producers realize that there is no sense in forwarding to a consumer knowledge which does not correspond to his preconceptions, then intelligence is through." ~ Sherman Kent

RJ Hillhouse, then you will appreciate her interview over at Democracy Now!. The CIA is virtually an empty shell of what it used to be.

Inexperience do to fleeing veterans, outsourced intel gathering, competition from the Pentagon, and a hostile executive branch is my take on why the CIA is now less capable than before 9.11.

Blogger Oliver Willis: “I used to believe that a lot of these people were just talking over my head, their discourse too lofty for a regular guy like myself. But that isn’t true. They’re just stupid.”

The Agency Defends Its Legacy

The CIA has repeatedly taken bullets it to protect both those it serves, ongoing operations and its own code of silence. It's taken blame for 9/11 despite the CIA Counterterrorist Center's Chief Cofer Black's urgent and repeated warnings that bin Laden was poised to strike in the US. It's been criticized for prewar intelligence failures in Iraq, even though the intelligence coming up through the Agency was accurate and its predictions about the postwar challenges were chillingly accurate. The Agency rarely sets the record straight and that's part of what makes it such an easy target for public criticism. On Monday, it broke the silence and issued a statement about the inaccuracies of a recent book, Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes, that claims to be "the definitive history of the CIA."

[...]

...He clearly hadn't done the background fact-checking that I would expect from a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist. I was even more shocked to see a version of these unfounded claims in print in the pages of Legacy of Ashes. In this case, Mr. Weiner's accusations about Cofer Black do not match known facts that I had personally made Mr. Weiner aware of this at a time when he could have corrected the book--had he been interested in creating an unbiased history of the CIA. Clearly, that was not his objective.

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