Tim Weiner Quotes
The CIA … concealed its failures abroad, lying to Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy. It told those lies to preserve its standing in Washington.
The CIA has never denied this, and it seems to be corroborated in that none of the CIA reports to the Presidents ever mentioned the failures and there is no CIA official who ever claimed that they informed either of the Presidents. In particular, when Kennedy initially went along with the ill-fated CIA Bay of Pigs invasion plan not realizing that the CIA had a dismal record of major misjudgments and failures of covert operations.
Tim Weiner, Intelligence Historian, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, 2007
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Agree resigned from the CIA in protest to its political position.
Kellis was the first of the Central Intelligence Agency whistle blowers. The President acted promptly on the letter and appointed General Jimmy Doolittle to conduct an investigation which confirmed the Kellis letter.
Alsop, a political hawk was convinced, as many other right wingers were at the time that the Russians had forged ahead of us in offensive missiles. When he asked President Eisenhower, the President never denied it, but never went to Congress to ask for more money to close the “missile gap”. Alsop made this shocking accusation which offended many Americans, but pleased the ultra-hawks and anti-communists. Most of the nation however then believed that there was a missile gap, with varying explanations of Eisenhower’s silence on the matter. Two years later John F. Kennedy, used the “missile gap” when running in 1960 against Nixon by attacking Nixon and Eisenhower for allowing us to fall behind the Russians at have a missile gap. When Kennedy became President, he was very surprised that there was no missile gap favoring the Russians—it was favoring the United States. Eisenhower did not want the Russians to know that he knew exactly what they were producing and deploying in missiles through great espionage sources. By not saying anything in the face of the accusations, the Russians assumed that the Americans really thought that they had more capacity than they did. And Eisenhower wanted that so that they would be secure that the United States had no real knowledge of their missile capacity. If Eisenhower had actually told the nation that the Russians were really behind us, the Russians would suspect a security leak and our sources could be compromised.
In her younger days Steinham worked with the CIA. Originally the Office of Strategic Service, the precursor to the CIA, was an amalgam of some of the nation’s most educated and dedicated people who tended to be very idealistic in saving the world from fascists like Nazi Germany and Japan. The were extremely nonpolitical and were not involved in the liberal conservative battles that the agency got itself into as the Red Scare and the fear of Communism affected much of the society including the CIA.
Precursor to CIA. During WWII Donovan’s OSS, the FBI and the State Department had the three civilian intelligence organizations while each of the 4 Armed Services had their own intelligence services. Rarely did any of these 7 organizations communicate with any of the others. In the case of the OSS, the FBI and the military services tended to try and obstruct many of their operations. This was the first call for what became the CIA.
If Casey had listened to Sofaer as the State Department did, President Reagan would have been spared the worst Scandal of his Presidency—Iran Contra. Casey had a great antipathy to lawyers. See {637470}.
3rd Earl Russell of Kingston. The main reason for the secrecy was that the FBI had made some serious blunders in tracking Oswald before the assassination, and failed to apprehend him when he was involved in another attempted assassination, and no one thought this negated the single assassin theory so J. Edgar Hoover was able to keep the Bureau’s incompetence secret. However, the CIA, even with the secrecy lied to the Commission to cover up their blunder in having hired Mafia organized crime figures to assassinate Fidel Castro. The attempts failed but Castro threatened to retaliate, and this possibility was never discussed by the Warren Commission as they did not have the information much less the public. Because of the secrecy, many people have been suspicious of the lone assassin conclusion that the commission had reached as they assumed venality rather than incompetence.
Oswald was the assassin of President John F. Kennedy.
Helms, then Deputy CIA Director, and other CIA witnesses, even though under oath, covered up the fact that they had initiated and failed in a number of attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro which since became public knowledge. There may well have been other CIA motivations for misleading the commission. The fact that they did, as well as the FBI which also was not truthful with the commission, has led credence to all the wild conspiracy theories that people have come up with about the assassination. See {642340}.
Tim Weiner is an American reporter and author. He is the author of five books and co-author of a sixth, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. His newest book is The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare, 1945–2020
