Review: "Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA," by Tim Weiner

That's how what little oversight Congress had put in place after the agency's abuses of the 1960s and 1970s (including domestic spying and infiltration of political and peace groups) was evaded. And how scandal after scandal was seeded from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo to whatever shame and embarrassment surfaces with every new investigative report on the CIA.

To this day, Weiner writes, the CIA, Congress and the presidency have yet to answer the paradoxical questions at the heart of the CIA's dark-sided missions: "How do you run a secret intelligence service in an open democracy? How do you serve the truth by lying? How do you spread democracy by deceit?" Weiner's exhausting--rather than exhaustive--history suggests that step one would be to abolish the CIA altogether and starting from scratch, with blueprints written with oversight foremost in mind. Paradoxical as this sounds, secrecy by necessity must besecond to oversight, if secrecy isn't to be, as it has been throughout the CIA's history, the leading edge of scandal, failure and catastrophe.