Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA is a work of history by Tim Weiner, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who reported on national security for The New York Times. Drawing on more than 50,000 documents, most of them from the agency's own archives, and on hundreds of interviews with CIA veterans, including ten former directors of central intelligence, Weiner traces the agency from its founding after World War II through the early years of the twenty-first century. He argues that across six decades and many presidencies the CIA repeatedly failed at its central task of understanding the world, and that when it could not understand events it often tried to change them through covert action. The book covers coups, failed operations and intelligence misjudgments that shaped American foreign policy. It won the 2007 National Book Award for Nonfiction.