Tim Weiner > Quotes

“Intelligence fails because it is human, no stronger than the power of one mind to understand another. (480)”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“Washington was a small town run by people who believed that they lived in the center of the universe.”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“[Re: J. Edgar Hoover] His knowledge was enormous, though his mind was narrow.”
― Tim Weiner, Enemies: A History of the FBI

“For sixty years tens of thousands of clandestine service officers have gathered only the barest threads of truly important intelligence—and that is the CIA’s deepest secret.”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“The CIA’s officers in Baghdad and in Washington tried to warn that the path the president was pursuing in Iraq was disastrous. They said the United States could not run a country it did not understand. Their words carried no weight at the White House. They were heresy in an administration whose policies were based on faith.”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“Never had so much intelligence meant so little. The conduct of the war had been set by a series of lies that the leaders of the United States told one another and the American people.”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“The CIA not only missed the invasion, it refused to admit that it had missed it. Why would anyone in his right mind invade Afghanistan, graveyard of conquerors for two thousand years? A lack of intelligence was not the cause of the failure. A lack of imagination was.”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“We’re not going to lose it. That’s all there is to it,” Richard Nixon said to Kissinger on February 18, as Lam Son 719 became a debacle. “We can’t lose. We can lose an election, but we’re not going to lose this war, Henry.… North Vietnam can never beat South Vietnam. Never.”
― Tim Weiner, One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon

“The American people are suckers,” Nixon said. “Gray Middle America—they’re suckers.”
― Tim Weiner, One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon

“The ability to represent failure as success would become an Agency tradition.”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“By ordering the director of central intelligence to conduct a program of domestic surveillance, Kennedy set a precedent that Presidents Johnson, Nixon, and George W. Bush would follow.”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“The answer was Stellar Wind. The NSA would eavesdrop freely against Americans and aliens in the United States without probable cause or search warrants. It would mine and assay the electronic records of millions of telephone conversations—both callers and receivers—and the subject lines of e-mails, including names and Internet addresses. Then it would send the refined intelligence to the Bureau for action. Stellar Wind resurrected Cold War tactics with twenty-first-century technology. It let the FBI work with the NSA outside of the limits of the law. As Cheney knew from his days at the White House in the wake of Watergate, the NSA and the FBI had worked that way up until 1972, when the Supreme Court unanimously outlawed warrantless wiretaps. Stellar Wind blew past the Supreme Court on the authority of a dubious opinion sent to the White House the week that the Patriot Act became law. It came from John Yoo, a thirty-four-year-old lawyer in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel who had clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas. Yoo wrote that the Constitution’s protections against warrantless searches and seizures did not apply to military operations in the United States. The NSA was a military agency; Congress had authorized Bush to use military force; therefore he had the power to use the NSA against anyone anywhere in America. The president was “free from the constraints of the Fourth Amendment,” Yoo wrote. So the FBI would be free as well.”
― Tim Weiner, Enemies: A History of the FBI

“At the root of this failure of intelligence was “our national ignorance of Vietnamese history, society, and language,” he said.”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“In the cold war, the CIA was condemned by the American left for what it did. In the war on terror, the CIA was attacked by the American right for what it could not do. The charge was incompetence, leveled by such men as Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld. Say what one may about their leadership, they knew from long experience what the reader now knows: the CIA was unable to fulfill its role as America’s intelligence service.”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“There weren’t any moderates left in the government of Iran.”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“As a consequence of its cultural myopia, the CIA misread the world.”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“To the CIA, everyone's an outsider.”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“They said Indonesia was a failure," Al Pope reflected bitterly. "But we knocked the shit out of them. We killed thousands of Communists, even though half of them probably didn't even know what Communism meant.”
― Tim Weiner

“The myth about the CIA dated back to the Bay of Pigs: that all its successes were secret, that only its failures were trumpeted. The truth was that the CIA could not succeed without recruiting and sustaining skilled and daring officers and foreign agents. The agency failed daily at that mission, and to pretend otherwise was a delusion.”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“Georgia. Human rights groups launched investigations into Russia’s reports of pitiless atrocities. It was fake news, but it took time to prove its falsity, and while the fact-checkers tried to disprove one story, the Kremlin put out two more. Russia proved that it could use television and the internet as weapons, launching barrages of disinformation and demonization—aiming, as one analyst put it, to “dismiss the critic, distort the facts, distract from the main issue, and dismay the audience.”
― Tim Weiner, The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020

“The Republican Roosevelt wanted to fight plutocrats as well as anarchists. Their plunder of oil, coal, minerals, and timber on federal lands appalled him, in his role as the founder of America’s national parks. Corporate criminals, carving up public property for their private profit, paid bribes to politicians to protect their land rackets. Using thousand-dollar bills as weapons, they ransacked millions of acres of the last American frontiers. In 1905, a federal investigation, led in part by a scurrilous Secret Service agent named William J. Burns, had led to the indictment and conviction of Senator John H. Mitchell and Representative John H. Williamson of Oregon, both Republicans, for their roles in the pillage of the great forests of the Cascade Range. An Oregon newspaper editorial correctly asserted that Burns and his government investigators had used “the methods of Russian spies and detectives.” The senator died while his case was on appeal; the congressman’s conviction was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court on grounds of “outrageous conduct,” including Burns’s brazen tampering with jurors and witnesses. Burns left the government and became a famous private eye; his skills at tapping telephones and bugging hotel rooms eventually won him a job as J. Edgar Hoover’s”
― Tim Weiner, Enemies: A History of the FBI

“Their attempts to make sense of the world had carried heat but little light.”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“So street-level FBI agents turned secrets into information, and senior FBI leaders brought that information to reporters, to prosecutors, to federal grand juries, and into the public realm. That was the beginning of the end of Richard Nixon’s presidency. Without the FBI, the reporters would have been lost.”
― Tim Weiner, Enemies: A History of the FBI

“Putin had launched “a new form of warfare” in which the human mind was the main battlefront, a comprehensive assessment by the Modern War Institute at West Point concluded a decade later. Using disinformation and deception, “Russia created the time and space to shape the international narrative in the critical early days of the conflict.” The West Point study saw four essential elements of Russian information warfare on display in Georgia and thereafter: “First, and most benignly, it aims to put the best spin it can on ordinary news; second, it incites a population with fake information in order to prep a battlefield; third, it uses disinformation or creates enough ambiguity to confuse people on the battlefield; and fourth, it outright lies.” The overarching Russian strategy was “to degrade trust in institutions across the world.”
― Tim Weiner, The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020

“They might not love Big Brother, but they knew he was part of the family now.”
― Tim Weiner, Enemies: A History of the FBI

“On June 20, 1951, less than four weeks after the Homer case broke, Hoover escalated the FBI’s Sex Deviates Program. The FBI alerted universities and state and local police to the subversive threat, seeking to drive homosexuals from every institution of government, higher learning, and law enforcement in the nation. The FBI’s files on American homosexuals grew to 300,000 pages over the next twenty-five years before they were destroyed. It took six decades, until 2011, before homosexuals could openly serve in the United States military.”
― Tim Weiner, Enemies: A History of the FBI

“On October 20, 2011, the rebels overran Qaddafi’s last stronghold, found him hiding in a drainpipe, sodomized him with a bayonet, and killed him, capturing his last moments on video. Putin watched that tape over and over again, probably thinking that this was what happened when America wanted to change a regime—Milošević dead in a prison cell, Saddam with a noose around his neck, Qaddafi on the wrong end of a spear.”
― Tim Weiner, The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020

“The Vietnamese have a saying that you can’t use a basket to cover a lion or an elephant.”
― Tim Weiner, One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon

“As the technology of espionage expanded its horizons, the CIA’s vision grew more and more myopic. Spy satellites enabled it to count Soviet weapons. They did not deliver the crucial information that communism was crumbling. The CIA’s foremost experts never saw the enemy until after the cold war was over.”
― Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

“As Yanukovych went underground, Putin led the closing ceremonies in Sochi and ordered Russian special-operations forces and troops based at the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet to seize Crimea’s airfields and its regional parliament. Thousands of Russian soldiers, their uniforms bearing no insignia, took control of the peninsula. Putin insisted that they were local militias. Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu denied that Russian troops were in Crimea even as Ukrainian soldiers surrendered to them. The Ukrainians started calling the invaders “little green men,” evidently from outer space.”
― Tim Weiner, The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020