Legacy of Ashes [antikvár]

AUTHOR'S NOTELegacy of Ashes is the record of the first sixty years of the Central Intelhgence Agency. It describes how the most powerful country in the history of Western civilization has failed to create a first-rate spy service. That failure constitutes a danger to the national security of the United States.Intelligence is secret action aimed at understanding or changing what goes on abroad. President Dwight D. Eisenhower called it "a distasteful but vital necessity." A nation that wants to project its power beyond its borders needs to see over the horizon, to know what is coming, to prevent attacks against its people. It must anticipate surprise. Without a strong, smart, sharp intelhgence service, presidents and generals alike can become blind and crippled. But throughout its history as a superpower, the United States has not had such a service.History, Edward Gibbon wrote in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, is "little more than the register of crimes, folUes, and misfortunes of mankind." The annals of the Central Intelhgence Agency are filled with folly and misfortune, along with acts of bravery and cunning. They are replete with fleeting successes and long-lasting failures abroad. They are marked by political battles and power struggles at home. The agency's triumphs have saved some blood and treasure. Its mistakes have squandered both. They have proved fatal for legions of American soldiers and foreign agents; some three thousand Americans who died in New