Posts tagged Tim Weiner

AUDIOBOOK Read by Stefan Rudniki

Wow, this book is scary.  A history of the CIA from it’s inception through the post-9/11 agency, Legacy of Ashes is a narrative pulled from thousands of declassified documents.  Tim Weiner does a remarkable job of telling a cohesive story from the formation, to the clandestine operations in Central America, Asia, and beyond, to the complete inability of the CIA to gather much useful intelligence on the Soviets.  The major theme of the book is that the real CIA is not the CIA of the movies.  It describes an agency that spends much of it’s time trying to get out of it’s own way and shifting on the whims of presidents and directors.  It appears that the CIA has spent most of it’s history guessing and little of it actually gathering intelligence.  The book drags in places, which is sometimes troublesome for an audiobook as you can’t skim ahead, but that happens with most non-fiction audiobooks.  Rudniki does a decent job narrating and the book has enough action to keep the listener’s attention despite the length.