The Economist anmelder en ny bok om CIA og organisasjonens historie. Det er ingen stolt fortelling, og jeg mener ikke i betydningen moralsk forkastelig. Jeg mener i ren funksjonell betydning.

For ifølge forfatteren Tim Weiner - til daglig journalist i The New York Times - er det først og fremst de mange, mange blunderne og tabbene man biter seg merke i, når det gjelder CIAs virke:

His principal charge is incompetence, and this he pursues with the zeal of a prosecutor. The most powerful country in the world, he complains, has yet to develop “a first-rate spy service”.

(…)

The 1947 act that set up the agency gave it two tasks: briefing the president with intelligence and conducting secret operations for him abroad. In Mr Weiner’s view the CIA was lamentable at both—and most presidents must take a share of the blame.

The CIA failed to warn the White House of the first Soviet atom bomb (1949), the Chinese invasion of South Korea (1950), anti-Soviet risings in East Germany (1953) and Hungary (1956), the dispatch of Soviet missiles to Cuba (1962), the Arab-Israeli war of 1967 and Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. It overplayed Soviet military capacities in the 1950s, then underplayed them before overplaying them again in the 1970s.

(…)

The CIA’s defenders complain that only the bad news ever emerges. Yet if Mr Weiner is holding back good news, it is not for lack of searching. As 180 pages of end-notes attest, he has devoured congressional reports, former spies’ memoirs and declassified papers from possibly the most unsecret service ever—a credit of a kind to American democracy.

Mr Weiner highlights many successes and is less harsh than many presidents. His title borrows a melancholy remark made by Dwight Eisenhower, who called what the CIA had wrought on his say-so “a legacy of ashes”. Richard Nixon, who had a sharp tongue, derided the agency’s analysts as clowns reading newspapers.

Its very conspicuousness makes the CIA hard to put into perspective. Some people believe that its impact, for good or ill, is overdrawn. It is one American intelligence agency among many. Its budget is less than a quarter of that for eavesdropping and satellite spying, which the Pentagon controls. The armed forces also have intelligence organisations of their own.

At times recently the CIA has come to look almost dispensable. Mr Weiner’s final chapter, “The Burial Ceremony”, describes the disdain in which the present administration came to hold it. By creating a new supreme post, the director of national intelligence, President George Bush has in effect robbed the CIA of direct access to the Oval Office. A 60-year struggle for influence ended with that change in 2004. In Mr Weiner’s words, “The Pentagon had crushed the CIA.”