Even if you are a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist for The New York Times who has written a brilliant and thoroughly researched book on a fascinating but obscure topic, there is always someone who knows something you don't. And those people tend to show up at readings in New York.
Tim Weiner, author of Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, read at Bottlerocket, the ultra-cool wine emporium located just west of Fifth Avenue on 19th Street. The evening was the first of their "Eclectic Salons" where writers are paired with appropriate wine tastings. Last night's offerings were a white, Incognito (Viognier 2005) and a red Roshambo (Justice Syrah 2004).
In light of the venue, Weiner read a few alcohol-related passages. One of them concerned James J. Angleton, a chief counterintelligence officer in the early days of the agency. He described Angleton as "well on his way to becoming one of the CIA's champion alcoholics--a title held in stiff competition." When Angleton's plans to parachute CIA operatives behind the Iron Curtain were consistently thwarted and men were captured, tortured and killed, he didn't know why. He had to look no farther than his drinking buddy, collaborator and counterspy, Kim Philby. Weiner also talked about Aldridge Ames, America's own double agent. His previous book, Betrayal, was about Ames, whom he interviewed for many hours in prison. Ames was under the influence of a fifth of vodka nearly every day he worked for the agency. When the CIA tried to interrogate Ames, his memory was so impaired he couldn't tell them anything.
After the reading, a man asked Weiner if the CIA did anything right? He said yes. "They told LBJ that Vietnam could not be won with with bombs and guns. LBJ didn't listen, because he wanted to nail Ho Chi Minh's hide to the wall," Weiner said. Eventually LBJ concluded they were right and didn't run for re-election. The CIA also deftly handled the collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War. "They didn't dance on the Berlin Wall," he said. "Ultimately there were a lot of short term successes but a lot more long term failures," Weiner said. The man who posed the question, David Hunt, had been a CIA Operations Officer for 32 years. Hunt had known Angleton nearly all his life and and said, yes, he drank, but wasn't a drunk. He defended the CIA, saying Clinton had no interest in intelligence. "You may remember," he said, "that a small plane crashed into the back of the White House lawn in the 1990s. The joke goes it was then-CIA director Jim Woolsey trying to get into the White House. When you have a president who doesn't care about the CIA, a lot of top rate people leave." Wiener agreed, and later made the point that Americans are relatively new at intelligence. Communists started spying on us at the end of World War I, the British have been at it for 500 years and the Chinese for three millenniums. "At the end of the Cold War, there was a feeling of "Game Over" and thousands of years of experience walked out the door. Clinton's foreign policy was spreading freedom through free trade and selling sneakers to the Chinese," he said. The wake-up call came on August 7, 1998. "Blowing up two embassies isn't twice as hard, it's one hundred times harder."
Weiner said 9/11 was not the failure of the CIA, but of the entire American government. The CIA's greatest failure was Iraq 's WMD intelligence. --Sherry Mazzocchi
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