Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Tim Weiner's new book provides some succinct summaries of key moments in CIA history. The style is light, very readable and often amusing. For people unfamiliar with CIA history there is much to learn here. There are however serious problems. The book masquarades as a muckraking attack on the Agency, but, IMO, this is deceptive. Yes the book is critical of the Agency, but mostly about cats long out of the bag. The effect is to lend creedence to the authors version of some much more contested events. Because the author relies so heavily on information from CIA sources and CIA historians, this creedence is unwarranted. Notable examples include anything to do with the Kennedy Administration. Weiner's verison of the Bay of Pigs, somehow manages to blame everything on Bissell, and omits massive amounts of detail suggesting there was an attempt by the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff to force Kennedy's hand and order a full scale invasion in 1961. David Talbot, in his excellent book Brothers, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, points out that many Kennedy bashers have one thing in common: they rely heavily on the buck passing and outright lying of Richard Helms and his media-friendly minion Sam Halpern. Weiner's book is a new case in point. Some have commented on how well document they think this book is. I find the opposite is true. Compare the documentation that Larry Hancock presents in support of Someone Would Have TalkedSomeone Would Have Talked: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the Conspiracy to Mislead History. These standards are miles appart, perhaps quite litterally were we to compare odometers! In other areas, Weiner seems too intent on puting a bungeling, keystone cop type of interpretation on the wacky antics of the Agency. Other authors might justifiably use the word terrorism, when applied to CIA interventions in places like Guatemala and Indonesia. Weiner is too quick to leave thes hell-holes once the new dictatorship is established. The result is that the reader never fully grasps the amount of deaths the US is directly responsible for. In many of these countries, the CIA's invovlvement only began with the coups. They created paramilitary networks in Guatemala and El Salvador that were centralized under the presidents. This centralization of violence was the work of the efficient CIA, not a bunch of bungeling keystone cops. In Indonesia, the CIA direcly aided in the killing of between 750,000 and 1.25 million people. If there is a more censored history of genocide, its doing great work! Weiner's book downplays these numbers, and completely avoids the issue of CIA involvement in the bloodbath. Most historians agree that John McCone was something of a figurehead at the agency, while the real power was exerted by the the Helms-Shackley faction, without the shipbuilder knowing what was going on. Certainly there was much ado about Cuba that McCone was unaware of. None of that is in Weiners book. McCone comes accross as perhaps the most able leader in agency history. Trouble is he was in fact its most powerless, with possible competition form Stansfield Turner. This gets really bizarre when Weiner turns McCone into the hero of the Cuban Missile Crisis and makes the Kennedys seem more akin to Curtis Lemay. Kennedy insiders like Ted Sorenson would certainly disagree: I believe that CIA director John McCone preferred the air strike Invasion option to the blockade/quarantine option. And it was those two choices that we finally came down to. But he was careful to offer policy recommendations only when requested by the president and to keep the CIA's role primarily as one of gathering the facts.(CNN interview, 1998) Weiner's view of McCone as diametrically opposed to Sorenson's: McCone is presented as the savior during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Sure he is entitled to disagree with most historians, but he better offer more sources than the self-serving CIA documents he uses. He is on equally shaky Langley ground when he asserts that JFK directly ordered the assassination of Castro. This question is subject to intense debate in 2007, with so much new material recently being analyzed. If Weiner wants to assert that JFK directly ordered the Castro hit, he needs a lot more backup. He also completely ignores the pressure that Kennedy was under from the JCS, and much of the corporate media, which was directly trying to undermine his Cuba policy. He does not mention Kennedy's history of using a two-track policy, of exploring military options with the CIA and JCS, while simultaneously exploring peaceful solutions via backchannels to Laos, Vietnam, and Cuba. Weiner's account of Kennedy and the CIA is vacuum packed, straight from Langley. This brings us to another point. Weiner does very little to help us understand how the CIA works with other political and economic forces to shape our foreign policy. Close relations with defense contractors are never mentioned. Close ties with companies favoring direct intervention by the US to keep wages at starvation level are also barely metioned if at all (What no United Fruit?) What about ties to newspapers like Mr. Weiner's own New York Times. To his credit, Weiner does acknowledge these ties-- in just one paragraph! He fails to even begin to explore how these very direct ties actually affected policy. Perhaps it would be a bad career move. Weiner's book masquerades as muckraking. It isn't. Its primary problem is that it relies far too much an Agency sources, particularly those associated with the mendacious Mr. Helms. These sources are used in precisely the most damning moment in the history of the Agency. At this point it might serve the reader to look up the meaning of the intelligence term "limited hangout". It is worth noting that this book is so anti-Kenndey as to make even Seymour Hersh blush. Just what one would expect from his Weiner's Langley sources. ( Seriously, look at the mans notes and note just how much is from CIA papers. This does not mean that all CIA reords are false. Of course not. I am simply stating that there is a very severe imbalance here. The strategy seems to be, if the Warren Commissin no longer holds watter-- and it certaily doesn't as Columbia University history professor Alan Brinley points out in a recent review of Talbot's book-- lets switch to making it look like Kennedy deserved what's coming. One is free to argue this, but again, the sourcing has to be much more convincing; there needs to be much less reliance on an agency with a majic bullet to grind.