We felt we were being taught by experts, and relished the experience. Twelve weeks at the Infantry School at Fort Benning came as a vast improvement. Our instructors were mediocre at best, and we never could learn what actual experience they had had, if any. A group of about 40 of us worked out of a large safe house in Maryland, and were introduced to the rudiments of surveillance, dead drops, and secret writing.

The training I received was a very mixed bag. His reply was, “Oh, they jump out of airplanes, and are going to save the world.” I immediately applied to CIA, and reported for duty two days after my last final examination at college, in June 1951. He advised me to apply to CIA, an organization I had hardly heard of. I was interviewed in Washington by an NSA recruiter who quickly saw that I had no interest in returning to the increasingly technical field of cryptography. This led NSA to approach me in my senior year at Williams to see if I would like to resume that career. I joined the army in 1945, at the age of 17, and was trained as a cryptanalyst. My discomfort and chagrin come from the realization that things were often far worse than I had suspected them to be. The most honest answer I can give to that question is that Weiner’s meticulously researched book did not take me by surprise, and that I cannot quarrel with his basic conclusions. My wife has asked me how it made me feel to read such a litany of failure about an organization that had taken us to Saipan, Japan, Burma, Vietnam and Korea. For someone who spent 31 years as a CIA operations officer, Tim Weiner’s “Legacy of Ashes” is a painful, sometimes ugly read.

Legacy of ashes by tim weiner