Weiner, Tim. Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. New York: Doubleday, 2007. 702 pages.

Tim Weiner, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times, has put together "the first history of the CIA compiled entirely from firsthand reporting and primary documents." The 155 pages of end notes are impressive, and the book itself contains over 700 real names. "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." (page xvii)

Because of Weiner's preference for original sources, there are huge gaps in his coverage. There is almost nothing on the JFK assassination, the 1965 coup in Indonesia, the CIA's domestic spying during the 1960s, its mind-control experiments, the network of foundations that funded labor, cultural, and media efforts, its involvement with Operation Condor in Latin America, or the emergence of CIA cover institutions such as the National Endowment for Democracy. But what remains amounts to the broadest history of the CIA ever published. Unfortunately, Weiner seems more concerned with CIA incompetence than with the rank immorality of it all.
ISBN 978-0-385-51445-3

Compile a name index for this source

Search the NameBase site: While the best way to search for names is to use NameBase, most can also be found here by using only first and last name, separated by a single space, with no quotation marks.
IMF and World Bank

try a NameBase search          home page          register