Tim Weiner Responds to Stephen Weissman
TPM has published an attack on my book, “Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA,” by a former House staffer named Steve Weissman. In a poison-pen campaign that began a few months back at the CIA itself, I stand accused of twisting facts in order to win fame and glory. Only a fool or a knave would do that. I am neither.
Mr. Weissman, without attribution, closely copies the CIA’s malicious attack by pretending to parse a passage in the book in which President Eisenhower laments the state of American intelligence. Ike feared that he would leave “a legacy of ashes” to his successor. As the text and the corresponding endnotes make clear, the passage summarizes three conversations Ike led during the closing days of his presidency. He was pained by the increasing inability of Allen Dulles as Director of Central Intelligence to carry out the two main duties of his office: to run the CIA and to coordinate all American intelligence – military and civilian. Ike’s fears had been growing for four years. They were realized four months later at the Bay of Pigs.
Mr. Weissman next cites the case of Al Pope, an American pilot shot down over Indonesia during a CIA covert operation in 1958. Pope and many other American citizens were part of the agency's coup attempt, which went out of control and ended in failure.
Ike wanted to keep American fingerprints off the operation. The cloak of plausible deniability was part of the CIA's covert-operations charter. Dulles broke his compact with the president by violating this essential requirement. The coup was traced back to Washington when Pope was shot down.
Ike directed that “private persons operating on their own” should not be banned from entering the fray. But Pope, whom I interviewed, was not a 'private person.' He was a CIA contractor who knew he was working for a CIA-owned company and knew he was operating under instructions from the CIA.
Mr. Weissman then moves to a 1971 report on American intelligence by the future CIA chief, James Schlesinger. He gives it an incomprehensible misreading. I have tried and failed to make out his meaning. I conclude he may not know what he is talking about. His field of expertise is America’s cold-war Africa policies. Careful readers of “Legacy of Ashes” will see that I interviewed him on the subject (and thanked him in the citation on page 583). I would respect any argument from him about the book’s coverage of the work of the CIA in Africa. I see none.
Hastening to his conclusion, he demands a better book, buttressed by his own ideas. I invite him to write it.
“Legacy of Ashes” contains 514 pages of text, 154 pages of endnotes, and thousands of citations of primary documents. Dozens of reviewers and critics, including Michael Beschloss, Walter Isaacson, Evan Thomas, and David Wise, have applauded the book for its documentation. Don Gregg, a 31-year CIA veteran, wrote:
Weiner’s meticulously researched book did not take me by surprise.... I cannot quarrel with his basic conclusions [although] I am certain that other former agency officers will be as distressed as I am about how CIA’s overall record emerges in Weiner’s excellent book.I did my best to write a straightforward narrative, without anonymous sources or blind quotes. Using on-the-record sources, I tried to write a book that cannot be assailed for invented scenes or quotes. I should say: not fairly assailed. Instead, we have: “Ike didn’t mean what the author said he meant.” And beyond that we have attacks on my veracity and integrity.
I'm happy to say that the book won the National Book Award in November. I'm unhappy to report that it has been attacked by a handful of people, including two rival historians who are my competitors in the marketplace of ideas. Now comes Mr. Weissman, who has been trying and failing for months to find someone to publish his work.
One of your readers surmises that this attack is part of the annual hysteria induced by the upcoming Pulitzer Prizes, and concludes: 'Weissman [says] he's worried about the credibility of investigative journalism. He says he's holding a journalist accountable. Well, journalists don't typically write critical articles about people without giving them a chance to respond.' I agree. TPM's editors should have contacted me for a response before publication. It's long been said that a lie goes around the world in the time it takes the truth to put on its pants. A lapse of editorial judgment can hasten the speed of a lie.
Great to see Weiner here with a response. And I really do recommend his book, even though it's a big time investment. I disagree with Weiner on a kery issue -- he wants a better CIA while I pretty much don't trust the government to act covertly at all. But wherever you come down on that, the book is an excellent narrative history and it does shed some light not just on how the CIA has failed to do its job well but on how the CIA has slipped out from under reasonable civilian oversight and control.
March 23, 2008 12:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
Tim,
I enjoyed the book, but I'm puzzled by the absence of a discussion of Lee Harvey Oswald's connections to intelligence agencies. I've read a lot about that and I feel it's a really important issue.
March 23, 2008 6:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
I took two lessons from Mr. Weiner's impressive book: 1) CIA was always being asked to do the unlikely or the impossible, and it is not surprising these ambitions weakened the more reliable efforts of intelligence, and 2) we survived the completely wrong conclusions, repeatedly.
We have to try the intelligence game, since others are also trying, but we should not let it trump either good sense or public information that overrules the conclusions of analysts. And the infatuation presidents feel with operations, dirty tricks, sabotage, etc. must be restrained by the professionals, who can show how poor the odds of success are.
March 24, 2008 8:27 AM | Reply | Permalink
I haven't read "Legacy of Ashes," nor am I a scholar of the intelligence community. So I'm poorly positioned to weigh in on the merits of the specific arguments in this exchange. But I did feel compelled to comment on two aspects of Weiner's post.
The first is Weiner's need to impute dishonorable (and possibly conspiratorial) motivations to his critics. He sets the piece that Weissman blogged for TPM within the context of a "poison-pen campaign that began a few months back at the CIA itself," and darkly observes that he "closely copies the CIA’s malicious attack" without attribution. Later in the piece, he writes that he's been assailed by "rival historians who are my competitors in the marketplace of ideas." He also asserts that Weissman's sphere of competence is limited to the Agency's interaction with Africa. None of these are worthy rebuttals of Weissman's charges. Does Weiner actually believe that the CIA is orchestrating a campaign to target him, in which a number of respected independent scholars are taking part? Has he forgotten that the "marketplace of ideas" is only a metaphor - or that such back-and-forth exchanges are precisely how it is supposed to operate? And would he really have us limit scholars to narrow fields of inquiry, even though one might, by the same logic, exclude a journalist from the writing of history entirely?
The real problem with these lines of attack, however, isn't merely that they cheapen the discourse and needlessly raise the level of animosity - it's that they're largely immaterial. Who cares whether the attacks are orchestrated or independent, self-interested or objective, launched by qualified scholars or by academics wandering far from their fields of expertise. All that ultimately matters is whether or not the criticisms are well-grounded or innaccurate. And none of the dark insinuations offered by Weiner serve to answer that fundamental question.
The other prominent defense offered by Weiner is that his book "contains 514 pages of text, 154 pages of endnotes, and thousands of citations of primary documents." He cites the plaudits of critics and the piling up of awards. The issue, again, is that this is largely immaterial. Neither book critics nor awards committees are in the habit of actually checking 154 pages of endnotes or thousands of citations. All of the plaudits and praise are offered on a basic assumption of good faith and competence - to wit, that the book's claims are made in good faith, that the citations are accurate, that the sources are fairly summarized, that the available evidence has been fully and not selectively represented by the proferred quotations. The vast apparatus of citations is intended to allow the claims of the book to be independently verified when they strike its readers as unusual, improbable, or especially important.
And that's the nature of the present controversy. Weissman (like a number of other scholars) says that he's actually returned to the source documents, and he believes that the manner in which they're summarized in several key passages in the book is unrepresentative and deliberately misleading. Weiner says he's been accurate, and fairly transparent in his use of the sources, and challenges Weissman to produce a better volume himself if he's dissatisfied. Both offer selective quotations from the original sources in support of their respective positions - without the full documents before us, I don't honestly see how any of us are in a position to adjudicate their claims. So I'd challenge Weissman and Weiner to post the relevant documents in their entirety, for those of us without the time or resources to dig them up ourselves, and let their audience judge the dispute on its merits.
I'll leave off with these two thoughts. The first is that it's important to resist the temptation to take sides in this dispute based upon our own opinions of the CIA and its activities. It's entirely possible to construct a convincing and satisfying narrative - as by all accounts Weiner has done - without accurately representing the underlyign sources. When Michael Bellesiles published "Arming America," I was delighted - the book was a scholarly, meticulously researched work by a highly-respected academic that showed, definitively, how the gun-rights community had constructed a mythological past. It was lauded to the skies by critics, and awarded the Bancroft Prize. It was also indisputably fraudulent. At the time, I dismissed its critics as a handful of cranks, taking offense at the volume's conclusions. And though that's not an entirely inapt characterization of the initial critics of Bellesile's work, it didn't alter the fact that they were, well, correct. It was, for me, a valuable lesson in the merits of scholarly objectivity, and in the importance of weighing criticisms on their own terms, without regard for the ideological baggage of those who profer them. The second thought I'd offer is that this sort of exchange (less its ad hominem attacks) is precisely the sort of healthy dialogue that creates the "marketplace of ideas" to which Mr. Weiner alludes. There's no need for him to assail his critics in such harsh terms; I wish he'd welcome the opportunity to discuss his claims before an interested and engaged audience, and to defend the enormous amount of effort and research he's invested in this volume. It's not something journalists are often called upon to do - they don't engage in exchanges of letters on the op-ed page regarding their work, nor are they asked to pen responses to their critics. In general, journalists are forced to let their work speak for itself - and their audience is left to trust to the editorial standards and fact-checking processes of the publication for which they write. Books are a very different medium. There's no analogous fact-checking process. Important scholarly works often spark prolonged exchanges in journals or (these days) online, in which the contours of disputes are fleshed out. I encourage Weiner to embrace the opportunity presented to him by his critics, and to share at greater length with all of us his defense of his work. And I likewise encourage Weissman and Weiner's other critics to respond to Weiner's defense with essays that are as careful and detailed as the book itself.
March 24, 2008 9:24 AM | Reply | Permalink
Fly,
Good post. But I think Weissman's motives, whatever they are, do matter here. It's not actually Weiner who is characterizing the "poison pen" campaign -- it's documented in the CQ article that Weissman links to.
In the end, you're right. Weiner says he's reading the documents properly and Weissman says he isn't and both can offer quotations to back up their opinions.
But if Weissman wants to debunk the book, he should do what a journalist would do and present Weiner with a detailed list of complaints and at least give him a chance to respond. If Weiner can't or won't respond, you then go public noting his refusal. If he responds but fails to convince you go public giving him some space in your article to defend himself and you hope your stronger argument prevails. If you're right, you tend to get a much stronger and more influential piece.
Weissman decided, for whatever reason not to do the work required. That's both a professional and an ethical lapse, I think and it undermines Weissman's credibility as a critic.
March 24, 2008 10:00 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for your reply. I'd take issue with you on just one point - your assertion that Weissman "should do what a journalist would do," contacting Weiner privately in an effort to clarify disputed points. Weiner himself makes a similar point about Richard Betts in the CQ piece (thanks for pointing me in that direction).
In both cases, I think that part of what we're witnessing is a clash of expectations. Betts and Weissman aren't journalists, and I can't see why they should be bound to behave as if they were. Weiner put his work into the public domain. He hasn't voiced any objection to the positive reviews he has received - indeed, he cites and quotes from them above. I very much doubt that these reviewers wrote to Weiner to vet the criticisms that balanced their reviews before they submitted them for publication. But so long as the overall tone was laudatory, Weiner appears not to have objected. He might well have challenged their expertise (is Walter Isaacson really more qualified to vouch for the book than Weissman is to criticize it?) or their objectivity (others are longstanding critics of the Agency), but chooses not to. So you'll forgive me if I regard the attacks that he's launched at his critics along these lines with a certain degree of cynicism.
Weiner has said that witnessing these attacks is not "like seeing someone punching your kids," and the inaptitude of the metaphor speaks to the depth of Weiner's apparent misapprehension. I think it's fairly clear that this sort of defensive posture has inflamed his critics. The debate ought to focus on ideas and words, not on the people who are presenting them.
I'd also add that there seem to be disputes on two entirely separate levels here - let's adopt Richelson's formulation of alleged errors of omission and commission. The disputes over the meaning of "legacy of ashes" or over the first line of the book fall into the latter category - some critics allege that Weiner has innacurately represented his sources. Then there are complaints about Weiner's neglect of supposed CIA successes, or his alleged innattention to intelligence gathering and other aspects of the Agency's duties - these fall into the former category. As a general rule, errors of commission are the greater scholarly sin. That scholars disagree on the balance between success and failure at the CIA is unsurprising - and if Weiner overstates his case, that's something of which virtually all authors are guilty. The controversy suggests that those interested in the CIA ought not to rely on "A Legacy of Ashes" as their sole source, but we hardly needed a bitter fight to tell us that - relying on a single take is never a good idea. And, as Weiner points out, if his critics disagree, they're welcome to write their own books. But sins of commission are harder to dismiss as a simple matter of contrasting perspectives. That's why the debate over them has grown particularly bitter, and why it'd be useful to see the underlying documents publicly posted.
March 24, 2008 11:22 AM | Reply | Permalink
Interesting stuff. I'm a journalist who also writes book reviews and so I do write about people's books all the time without ever discussing it with them. My usual method is that if I'm making an aesthetic judgment or if I'm accepting the facts in the book as true that there's no need to egt the author involved. If I'm going to say the author got something wrong, though, I do give them a chance to convince me otherwise.
That's fairly standard journalism practice. You're right that not everyone has to behave like a journalist. Maybe Tim's being oversensitive and I'm being strident about enforcing trade practices where they don't belong.
But Weissman was even one of Wiener's sources. They knew how to get in touch with each other. I gather they even got along before this flap and that's why Wiener is so surprised.
If you go back to Weissman's post I was the first one up there calling on TPM to get Wiener here for a response. Partly it's because I had read and liked the book but also because something set off my spider sense.
I doubt it's part of some CIA effort to discredit the book. But I do think that literary and scholarly criticism that arises from jealousy can be a bad thing and Weissman seems a little jealous and certainly obsessed.
As for the root issues, we won't know until we see the documents, as you say. I wonder if they're available online? If Tim is reading the responses to his post maybe he can point us to them?
March 24, 2008 11:50 AM | Reply | Permalink
I appreciate the comments on both sides re my piece and Tim Weiner's.
Let’s calmly put aside Tim Weiner’s untrue allegations that I am part of a malicious campaign against him originally launched at the CIA, and that I “copied” one of my criticisms from others.
On the substance of the issues between us, Weiner’s response fails to deal with any of the quotations from declassified government documents that I presented to demonstrate that President Eisenhower and other high officials neither said nor meant what Weiner said they did. To defend his conclusion that Ike’s “legacy of ashes” remark was a judgment on the CIA’s failure as a spy service, he skips over the fact that Ike only used this phrase at a January 5, 1961 meeting to refer to the need to streamline military intelligence, and then says the “passage” in which this remark appears also refers to two other “conversations:” The trouble is that these additional discussions occurred at meetings that transpired one and two weeks after Ike’s “legacy of ashes” remark. Furthermore, although he differed with CIA Director Allen Dulles on some organizational issues discussed in those meetings, Ike never made anything like a “legacy of ashes” comment on the CIA’s performance during those conversations. But don’t just take my word for it. As Destor23 and FlyontheWall suggest, do what I did and go to a major library and read the documents themselves in U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961-1963, XXV, pp.142-67.
Regarding the Indonesia paramilitary operation, Weiner says that when Ike authorized Dulles to employ “private [American] persons operating on their own,” he did not mean to include people like Al Pope who was working for a CIA-owned private company called CAT. To the contrary, the same document shows that Ike acted in response to “the question of whether or not the United States should be tolerant of U.S. nationals acting on a purely private and ‘soldier-of-fortune’ basis (e.g.CAT).” Eisenhower never challenged his advisers’ categorization of CAT as “purely private.” Indeed the whole purpose of CIA fronts like CAT was to enable the U.S. Government to act through “private” mechanisms in order to conceal the official role. The only Americans Ike excluded from the Indonesian operation were “U.S. Government personnel” and Weiner himself acknowledges that Pope was only a “contractor”. Again, you can look up the document yourself in U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958-60, XVII (Indonesia), p. 109.
As I think you will see from reading the documents, in these and other parts of his book that I discussed, Weiner favors his own interpretation of what key figures said and meant over what they actually did say and mean.
March 24, 2008 12:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thank you for the citations.
A library, eh? Real work!
March 24, 2008 12:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
My primary political blogging endeavors at TPM Cafe have focused on impeachment. I am interested in your view of current Congressional responsibilities that would logically follow your assertions that:
George W. Bush has turned the institution “once proudly run by his father” into “a paramilitary police force abroad and a paralyzed bureaucracy at headquarters.”
and that:
President Bush “casually pronounced a political death sentence” on the C.I.A. in 2004 by dismissively explaining that the agency had been “just guessing” about the future of the Iraq war.
Thanks for your views expressed here,
Tish
March 24, 2008 4:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
Weisman's interpretation of Eisenhower's instructions regarding Indonesia makes no sense. If Eisenhower did not want personnel easily connected to the U.S. to implement the operation, that is... what he wanted. That the CIA used people who were easy to connect to the CIA was the whole point of Weiner's narrative. The idea Weissman is pushing is that this was somehow Eisenhower's screw up, but that won't wash. Now, one could say Eisenhower shouldn't have approved the operation in the first place, but the violation of the spirit of Eisenhower's directive was clearly the fault of the CIA, and no lawyer-like construal of what Eisenhower 'should have known" will change that fact.
March 24, 2008 11:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
If readers want to see the "legacy of ashes" wording in context, and not take anyone's word on it, they can consult the document in the Foreign Relations of the United States, the State Department historical series. Document 80 at this link http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/kennedyjf/xxv/6008.htm is the record of a meeting of the National Security Council that took place during Eisenhower's last month in office.
March 27, 2008 10:48 AM | Reply | Permalink
I have made a similar point in response to the original Weissman post, but since I am joining the conversation several days late I wanted to make the point here as well.
To say that Weissman is off the mark is an understatement.
To take just one example, Weissman argues that Weiner's use of Eisenhower's "legacy of ashes" phrase is misleading, that Ike was condeming the lack of intelligence coordination, not the CIA itself. Yet if you read the relevant passage of Weiner's book, it is quite clear that he is referring to the structure of the intelligence community as a whole. The issue of how intelligence is organized is central to Weiner's account. To quote the relevant passage:
"At the last, Dwight Eisenhower exploded in anger and frustration. 'The structure of our intelligence is faulty,' he told Dulles. It makes no sense, it has to be reorganized, and we should have done it long ago. Nothing had changed since Pearl Harbor. 'I have suffered an eight year defeat on this.' said the president of the United States. He said he would leave a 'legacy of ashes' to his successor."
Given how easy it is for anyone who has read Tim Weiner's book to see that Weissman has badly mis-characterized it, one can only assume that Weissman has an axe to grind. It is unfortunate in the extreme that TPM Cafe gave Weissman a forum without offering Tim Weiner the chance to respond simultaneously rather than after the fact.
March 27, 2008 3:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
If you read the documents Mr. Hartung, you will see that Ike was talking only about military intelligence -- not the whole intelligence community including the CIA -- in making his "legacy of ashes" remark. This is precisely why the passage you quote from the book deforms the documents. You will notice after looking at the documents that this passage is really a mixture of elements from two different meetings. Ike's comment about the overall structure of intelligence being "faulty" was made a week after his much stronger "legacy of ashes" lament about the failure to streamline purely military intelligence. Please do not jump to the false conclusion that I must have an axe to grind before consulting the evidence I present and reference.
March 28, 2008 1:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
Having read several of the relevant memos (including the one in which the "legacy of ashes" phrase appears)it is clear to me that Eisenhower was concerned with intelligence coordination writ large -- yes, about the separate military intelligence agencies, but also about which of their functions the CIA should be shouldering if there is ever to be a cohesive intelligence community. And in that context Pearl Harbor is referenced as well (in the sense of how can we better organize intelligence gathering so that kind of surprise doesn't happen again). In any case, this whole idea that one needs to "read the documents" to discern the flaws in Mr. Weissman's critique of the Weiner book ignores the central point: Weissman's charges misrepresent WHAT IS IN WEINER'S BOOK (i.e., Weissman claims the book says X, but when you turn to the relevant section the book in fact says Y). If Weissman can't get that straight, why should I assume that he is getting "the documents" straight?
March 28, 2008 5:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
I posted a similar comment on the original thread but will post it here again as I am joining this discussion a bit late.
As the comments above point out, Weissman's views are ill considered and he comes across as imbalanced. Let's let him in on a secret: no one will take you seriously if your "criticism" of a book is nothing more than taking snippets from it out of context...
Here's what I wrote:
I have read Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes and have read the various attacks on the book by Steven Weissman, and I think Weissman's comments are completely far-fetched and border on the ridiculous. Indeed, they are so off-base that I wonder what Weissman's motivation really is. What, but envy, would motivate someone to write an unsolicited "book review" for the Columbia Journalism Review and then complain to everyone in town when it was rejected?
So Weissman wishes he'd written the book himself and that he, not Tim Weiner, had won a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, so what?
We all know that there are a lot of sharp elbows in the world of investigative reporters (or as Weissman self-servingly labels himself and his crowd "scholars of the agency"). I find it rather laughable that Weissman would point to an attempted rebuttal by the CIA itself as "evidence" that Weiner's brilliant and magisterial work is lacking. Or that apologists for the CIA or the US's "intelligence community" might try to disparage a book that calls their life's work into question.
Go back and read Ambassador's Gregg's glowing and balanced comments on Legacy of Ashes in the original CQ article if you want to know what objective people thought of this incredible book.
So Mr. Weissman, what exactly is the axe you have to grind? A little bit jealous, are we?
I agree with William Hartung (above). Weissman's "attack" amounts to nothing more than a typical Washington tactic by which a self-proclaimed talking head tries to be a "player".....
March 31, 2008 9:57 AM | Reply | Permalink