Home > Work > Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
1 " It takes 5 to 7 years to turn a novice into a case officer capable of working in the capitals of the world. "
― Tim Weiner , Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
2 " Their attempts to make sense of the world had carried heat but little light. "
3 " The ability to represent failure as success would become an Agency tradition. "
4 " Intelligence fails because it is human, no stronger than the power of one mind to understand another. (480) "
5 " To the CIA, everyone's an outsider. "
6 " Washington was a small town run by people who believed that they lived in the center of the universe. "
7 " For sixty years tens of thousands of clandestine service officers have gathered only the barest threads of truly important intelligence—and that is the CIA’s deepest secret. "
8 " Never had so much intelligence meant so little. The conduct of the war had been set by a series of lies that the leaders of the United States told one another and the American people. "
9 " The CIA’s officers in Baghdad and in Washington tried to warn that the path the president was pursuing in Iraq was disastrous. They said the United States could not run a country it did not understand. Their words carried no weight at the White House. They were heresy in an administration whose policies were based on faith. "
10 " The CIA not only missed the invasion, it refused to admit that it had missed it. Why would anyone in his right mind invade Afghanistan, graveyard of conquerors for two thousand years? A lack of intelligence was not the cause of the failure. A lack of imagination was. "
11 " In the cold war, the CIA was condemned by the American left for what it did. In the war on terror, the CIA was attacked by the American right for what it could not do. The charge was incompetence, leveled by such men as Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld. Say what one may about their leadership, they knew from long experience what the reader now knows: the CIA was unable to fulfill its role as America’s intelligence service. "
12 " At the root of this failure of intelligence was “our national ignorance of Vietnamese history, society, and language,” he said. "
13 " By ordering the director of central intelligence to conduct a program of domestic surveillance, Kennedy set a precedent that Presidents Johnson, Nixon, and George W. Bush would follow. "
14 " There weren’t any moderates left in the government of Iran. "
15 " The myth about the CIA dated back to the Bay of Pigs: that all its successes were secret, that only its failures were trumpeted. The truth was that the CIA could not succeed without recruiting and sustaining skilled and daring officers and foreign agents. The agency failed daily at that mission, and to pretend otherwise was a delusion. "
16 " As a consequence of its cultural myopia, the CIA misread the world. "
17 " Многие из них понятия не имели, чем занимаются или что они, как предполагалось, должны делать. После приведения к присяге кто-то спросил Соерса, что тот хочет сейчас сделать. "Я хочу пойти домой", - ответил он. "
18 " Традицией в Джорджтауне стал поздний воскресный приём. Главным "блюдом" были, естественно, спиртные напитки. "
19 " Что касается работы в ЦРУ, он заявил: "Я ожидаю худшего и уверен, что не буду разочарован". "
20 " Успех нельзя разрекламировать: провалы нельзя ничем объяснить. Герои разведки нигде не выделяются и никем не воспеты. "
