Synopses & Reviews
For the last sixty years, the CIA has managed to maintain a formidable reputation in spite of its terrible record, burying its blunders in top-secret archives. Its mission was to know the world. When it did not succeed, it set out to change the world. Its failures have handed us, in the words of President Eisenhower, "a legacy of ashes."
Now Pulitzer Prizewinning author Tim Weiner offers the first definitive history of the CIA and everything is on the record. Legacy of Ashes is based on more than 50,000 documents, primarily from the archives of the CIA itself, and hundreds of interviews with CIA veterans, including ten Directors of Central Intelligence. It takes the CIA from its creation after World War II, through its battles in the cold war and the war on terror, to its near-collapse after 9/ll.
Tim Weiner's past work on the CIA and American intelligence was hailed as "impressively reported" and "immensely entertaining" in The New York Times.
The Wall Street Journal called it "truly extraordinary...the best book ever written on a case of espionage." Here is the hidden history of the CIA: why eleven presidents and three generations of CIA officers have been unable to understand the world; why nearly every CIA director has left the agency in worse shape than he found it; and how these failures have profoundly jeopardized our national security.
Review
"This is a timely, immensely readable, and highly critical history of the CIA, culminating with the most recent catastrophic failures in Iraq." Mark Bowden, author of Blackhawk Down
Review
"This is a fascinating, deeply scary book. With prodigious reporting and on-the-record sources, Tim Weiner shows why the CIA has done so poorly in traditional intelligence. It's a riveting tale and also a warning. America must develop the ability and the will to know and face the facts about the world." Walter Isaacson, author of Benjamin Franklin: An American Life and Einstein: His Life and Universe
Review
"Legacy of Ashes, like all first-rate histories, is not only richly informative but provocative and insightful. It is a combustible mix of deeply-researched history, solid reporting and revealing anecdotes. Tim Weiner's history of the CIA explains not merely the past but the present, laying out in fine detail the structural and philosophical flaws that have dogged the Agency from day one and which continue to leave the country unduly vulnerable." Ted Gup, author of The Book of Honor and Nation of Secrets
Review
"Tim Weiner has read widely and dug deeply to produce this marvelous and convincing history of the CIA across six decades. That every quote is also on the record is a testament to his skill and also, thankfully, to the transparency that endures in the American political system." Steve Coll, author of Ghost Wars
Review
"[B]y using tens of thousands of declassified documents and on-the-record recollections of dozens of chagrined spymasters, Weiner paints what may be the most disturbing picture yet of C.I.A. ineptitude." New York Times
Review
"Weiner chronicles the CIA's willful ignorance, arrogance and so-called intelligence measured in quantity rather than quality, and poor judgment with anecdotes that often sound like plots invented by an evilly comic John le Carre. Even the footnotes make for good reading." Oregonian
Review
"[S]hould be must-reading for every presidential candidate and every American who wants to understand why the nation repeatedly stumbles into one disaster abroad after another." Boston Globe
Review
"[A] fascinating and revealing history a jewel of a book." Wall Street Journal
Review
"Weiner punctures claims by the spymasters at the Central Intelligence Agency that they have a track record of thwarting enemy threats and serving their nation well." Seattle Times
Review
"The most remarkable and...admirable thing about Legacy of Ashes is that it is based entirely on primary sources and on-the-record interviews. Nothing goes unattributed." Los Angeles Times
Review
"By now, the CIA's longtime role as secret army ought to be known to every American, though clearly it is not. At that level, Legacy of Ashes deserves a wide readership, and will probably win one given the page-turning gusto of its narrative." Newsday
Review
"Tim Weiner's excellent account of the CIA has already won many kudos and plaudits, including the National Book Award. There's not much I can add to that, other than to say folks really should read this book." Doug Brown, Powells.com (read the entire Powells.com review)
Synopsis
For decades, while America obsessed over Soviet spies, China quietly penetrated the highest levels of government. Now, for the first time, based on numerous interviews with key insiders at the FBI and CIA as well as with Chinese agents and people close to them, David Wise tells the full story of Chinaand#8217;s many victories and defeats in its American spy wars.Two key cases interweave throughout: Katrina Leung, code-named Parlor Maid, worked for the FBI for years, even after she became a secret double agent for China, aided by love affairs with both of her FBI handlers. Here, too, is the inside story of the case, code-named Tiger Trap, of a key Chinese-American scientist suspected of stealing nuclear weapons secrets. These two cases led to many others, involving famous names from Wen Ho Lee to Richard Nixon, stunning national security leaks, and sophisticated cyberspying. The story takes us up to the present, with a West Coast spy ring whose members were sentenced in 2010and#8212;but it surely will continue for years to come, as China faces off against America. David Wiseand#8217;s history of Chinaand#8217;s spy wars in America is packed with eye-popping revelations.
Synopsis
In the wake of the news that the 9/11 hijackers had lived in Europe, journalist Ian Johnson wondered how such a radical group could sink roots into Western soil. Most accounts reached back twenty years, to U.S. support of Islamist fighters in Afghanistan. But Johnson dug deeper, to the start of the Cold War, uncovering the untold story of a group of ex-Soviet Muslims who had defected to Germany during World War II. There, they had been fashioned into a well-oiled anti-Soviet propaganda machine. As that war ended and the Cold War began, West German and U.S. intelligence agents vied for control of this influential group, and at the center of the covert tug of war was a quiet mosque in Munich—radical Islams first beachhead in the West.
Culled from an array of sources, including newly declassified documents, A Mosque in Munich interweaves the stories of several key players: a Nazi scholar turned postwar spymaster; key Muslim leaders across the globe, including members of the Muslim Brotherhood; and naïve CIA men eager to fight communism with a new weapon, Islam. A rare ground-level look at Cold War spying and a revelatory account of the Wests first, disastrous encounter with radical Islam, A Mosque in Munich is as captivating as it is crucial to our understanding the mistakes we are still making in our relationship with Islamists today
Synopsis
A revelatory secret history of how America became home to thousands of Nazi war criminals after World War II, many of whom were brought here by the OSS and CIAand#8212;by the New York Times reporter who broke the story and who has interviewed dozens of agents for the first time.
Synopsis
The shocking story of how America became one of the worldand#8217;s safest postwar havens for Nazis and#160; Until recently, historians believed America gave asylum only to key Nazi scientists after World War II, along with some less famous perpetrators who managed to sneak in and who eventually were exposed by Nazi hunters. But the truth is much worse, and has been covered up for decades: the CIA and FBI brought thousands of perpetrators to America as possible assets against their new Cold War enemies. When the Justice Department finally investigated and learned the truth, the results were classified and buried.
Using the dramatic story of one former perpetrator who settled in New Jersey, conned the CIA into hiring him, and begged for the agencyand#8217;s support when his wartime identity emerged, Eric Lichtblau tells the full, shocking story of how America became a refuge for hundreds of postwar Nazis.
Synopsis
A narrative nonfiction account of the devious workings of Chinese Intelligence agents in the FBI over the past 30 years.
Synopsis
The extraordinary unknown story of how the CIA and an ex-Nazi intelligence agent gave radical Islam its foothold in the West, by a Pulitzer Prize-winning Wall Street Journal reporter
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About the Author
ERIC LICHTBLAU is a Pulitzer Prizeandndash;winning investigative reporter in the Washington bureau of the New York Times and has written about legal, political, and national security issues in the capital since 1999. He was the co-recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for his stories in the New York Times disclosing the existence of a secret wiretapping program approved by President George W. Bush after the 9/11 attacks. He was a reporter for the Los Angeles Times for fifteen years before joining the New York Times in 2002. A graduate of Cornell University, he is the author of Bushandrsquo;s Law: The Remaking of American Justice, which one reviewer called andldquo;All the Presidentandrsquo;s Men for an Age of Terror.andrdquo; In the course of research for The Nazis Next Door, he was a visiting fellow at the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. He lives outside Washington with his wife and children.
Table of Contents
CONTENTS
1. A Thousand Grains of Sand 5
2. Parlor Maid 20
3. The Recruitment 29
4. Double Game 34
5. Destroy After Reading 42
6. and#8220;Holy Shit, Mr. Grove!and#8221; 50
7. Riding the Tiger: China and the Neutron Bomb 65
8. The Walk-in 71
9. Kindred Spirit: Wen Ho Lee 81
10. Sego Palm 99
11. Trouble in Paradise 109
12. Ethereal Throne: The Spy Who Never Was 121
13. Storm Clouds 134
14. The Counterspy 139
15. Royal Tourist 154
16. Richard Nixon and the Hong Kong Hostess 167
17. Anubis 176
18. Endgame 187
19. Eagle Claw 202
20. Red Flower 214
21. The Cyberspies 227
22. An Afterword 236
Authorand#8217;s Note 243
Notes 247
Index 279
Prelude 1