Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter and local resident Tim Weiner won the National Book Award’s nonfiction category for Legacy of Ashes: The History of the C.I.A., a sweeping 600-page critical history of the agency with a particular emphasis on the intelligence failures that have occurred during the agency’s relatively short period of existence. “Legacy of Ashes,” writes Weiner, “is the record of the first sixty years of the Central Intelligence 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.”

Weiner goes further:

Legacy of Ashes sets out to show how it has come to pass that the United States now lacks the intelligence it will need in the years ahead….This book is based on my reading of more than fifty thousand documents, primarily from the archives of the CIA, the White House, and the State Department; more than two thousand oral histories of American intelligence officers, soldiers, and diplomats; and more than three hundred interviews conducted since 1987 with CIA officers and veterans, including ten directors of central intelligence. Extensive endnotes amplify the text. This book is on the record—no anonymous sources, no blind quotations, no hearsay. It is the first history of the CIA compiled entirely from firsthand reporting and primary documents.

What does the CIA think of Legacy of Ashes?