Weiner, Tim 1956-

PERSONAL: Born June 20, 1956, in White Plains, NY; son of Herbert (a professor) and Dora (a professor) Weiner. Education: Columbia University, B.A., 1978, M.S., 1979.

ADDRESSES: Home—New York, NY. Agent—Faith Hampton Childs, Faith Childs Literary Agency, 41 King St., New York, NY 10014.

CAREER: Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia, PA, reporter, beginning 1982; writer; New York Times, intelligence reporter, obituary writer.

AWARDS, HONORS: Pulitzer Prize, 1982, for local reporting, 1988, for national reporting; National Book Award, 2007, for Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA.

WRITINGS:

Blank Check: The Pentagon’s Black Budget, Warner Books (New York, NY), 1990.

Betrayal: The Story of Aldrich Ames, an American Spy, Random House (New York, NY), 1995.

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, Doubleday (New York, NY), 2007.

SIDELIGHTS: Tim Weiner is a reporter who was a Washington correspondent for the Philadelphia Inquirer and then covered national security for the New York Times. He received a Pulitzer Prize for local reporting, and Blank Check: The Pentagon’s Black Budget expands on Weiner’s prize-winning coverage of the budget of the Pentagon and the projects it has funded, including some very expensive mistakes.

Betrayal: The Story of Aldrich Ames, an American Spy is Weiner’s account of the CIA agent who sold the names of American spies and secret and top-secret documents to the Russian KGB in order to pay for an expensive divorce and the equally expensive lifestyle he was enjoying with Maria del Rosario Casas, a Colombian woman he met while working for the agency in Mexico.

Weiner visited Afghanistan in 1987 and reported on the CIA’s arming of rebels so that they could battle the Soviets. When he returned and talked to CIA staff in Washington, he discovered that they had never visited the country about which they were making decisions that would have historic consequences. Steve Weinberg, writing in Legal Times, commented that in Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, “Weiner punctures claims by the spymasters at the Central Intelligence Agency that they have stopped enemy threats and otherwise served their nation well.” Weiner drew on declassified CIA reports and interviews that paint “a withering portrait of an agency with more failures than successes [and] was written as a wake-up call in an age when the CIA is the front line against Islamic terrorism,” wrote Kevin Whitelaw in U.S. News & World Report. Whitelaw interviewed Weiner and asked if the book is more about the failure of the CIA or the failure of presidents to understand what the CIA is and what it isn’t.” Weiner, who said this book is not anti-CIA, lay the blame on the latter and said presidents did not understand the CIA, nor did they use it wisely. Weiner notes in this history six decades of incompetence as the CIA struggled to both gather intelligence and run covert operations. Many of the failures he cites are well known and include the Korean War, Cuban missile crisis, Arab-Israeli war of 1973, fall of the Soviet Union, and 1998 nuclear bomb test in India, but many are not common knowledge. As Carolyn O’ noted in New Statesman, Weiner “unearths evidence of the thousands of agents dropped behind the Iron Curtain and Asian enemy lines, only to be double-crossed and, very often, eliminated. And he reveals how director after director fabricated or manipulated intelligence for the White House, often to protect the agency or maintain the president’s good graces.” Weiner notes that Robert Gates, secretary of defense under George W. Bush, was head of the CIA under George H.W. Bush. In 1990, when Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s troops crossed the border from Iraq into Kuwait, Gates, under the first Bush, was hosting friends at a picnic when he was asked why he was there, considering the invasion, to which Gates replied, “What invasion?” Regarding the Middle East, Weiner is disturbed by the fact that the agency has not recruited enough Arabic-and Farsi-speaking agents. Weiner notes that President John F. Kennedy used the CIA to implement the assassination of South Vietnam president Ngo Dinh Diem. “We now know, thirty years after the fact, precisely the ways in which three presidents—Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon—abused the power of the CIA to spy on Americans. We will know in thirty years, if, when, and how this White House abused its powers to spy on Americans. We have no idea today.”

In a Baltimore Sun review, Jay Hancock wrote: “Numerous honorable and competent people have served the CIA. Few appear in this book, because too often their influence has been thwarted by terrible leadership and institutional recklessness. The roster of dilettantes, cowboys and boozers at the top levels of agency management over the years is staggering.” Weiner does credit various directors, including John McCone, who headed central intelligence from 1961 to 1965. His unacknowledged role critical to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis consisted of his warnings of the crisis and his creation of a path for its resolution. According to Weiner neither President Kennedy nor his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, were willing to give McCone, a Republican, any credit.

The CIA overthrew the elected leader of Guatemala at the behest of President Richard Nixon, beginning four years of military rule, violence, and death squads. More recently the agency reported that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction hidden in Iraq, which has never been proven and, in fact, has been generally discounted. Weiner contends that the CIA continues to be a danger to national security. Hancock wrote that Weiner has written “a brilliant narrative [and] the most complete history of the CIA yet. Plus, he employs dozens of smoking, newly declassified documents—many unearthed by him and his researchers—that add poignant details. His writing is economical and clear. He is master of the devastating juxtaposition of indisputable facts.”

Weiner participated in an online chat at the Web site of the Washington Post. He said that the title of the book “comes from a tongue-lashing that President Eisenhower gave his DCI [director of central intelligence], Allen Dulles, in January 1961, the end of Ike’s days in office. At the last, Eisenhower exploded in anger and frustration. ‘The structure of our intelligence organization is faulty,’ he told Dulles. It makes no sense, it has to be reorganized, and we should have done it long ago. Nothing had changed since Pearl Harbor. ‘I have suffered an eight-year defeat on this,’ said the president of the United States. He said he would ‘leave a legacy of ashes’ to his successor—JFK. And four months later came the Bay of Pigs.”

Tim Weiner once told CA: “I am a newspaper reporter who, through observation, interviews, documents, and traditional research methods, seeks to illuminate what is secret, hidden, or disguised in American foreign policy, national politics, military programs, and intelligence operations.”

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Baltimore Sun, August 5, 2007, Jay Hancock, review of Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA.

Booklist, June 1, 1995, Gilbert Taylor, review of Betrayal: The Story of Aldrich Ames, an American Spy, p. 1704; July 1, 2007, Gilbert Taylor, review of Legacy of Ashes, p. 14.

Christian Science Monitor, August 14, 2007, Randy Dotinga, review of Legacy of Ashes, p. 13.

Economist, August 18, 2007, review of Legacy of Ashes, p. 72.

Entertainment Weekly, June 30, 1995, D.A. Ball, review of Betrayal, p. 95.

Financial Times, September 22, 2007, Richard Dear-love, review of Legacy of Ashes, p. 32.

Foreign Affairs, September-October, 1995, Eliot A. Cohen, review of Betrayal, p. 167.

Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 2007, review of Legacy of Ashes.

Legal Times, July 30, 2007, Steve Weinberg, review of Legacy of Ashes.

National Catholic Reporter, October 5, 2007, Charles N. Davis, review of Legacy of Ashes, p. 1.

New Statesman, August 13, 2007, Carolyn O’Hara, review of Legacy of Ashes, p. 48.

New York Times, July 12, 2007, Michael Beschloss, review of Legacy of Ashes, p. E9.

New York Times Book Review, July 2, 1995, Joseph Finder, review of Betrayal; July 22, 2007, Evan Thomas, review of Legacy of Ashes, p. 11.

Publishers Weekly, July 20, 1990, Genevieve Stuttaford, review of Blank Check: The Pentagon’s Black Budget, p. 44; May 15, 1995, review of Betrayal, p. 66; June 4, 2007, review of Legacy of Ashes, p. 43.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 8, 2007, Harry Levins, review of Legacy of Ashes.

U.S. News & World Report, August 6, 2007, Kevin Whitelaw, “Beyond the CIA’s Veil,” interview, p. 24.

Washington Monthly, July-August, 1995, Walter Pincus, review of Betrayal, p. 51.

Wilson Quarterly Review, autumn, 2007, David J. Gar-row, review of Legacy of Ashes, p. 89.

ONLINE

New York Observer Online,http://www.observer.com/ (October 16, 2007), Leon Neyfakh, “Legacy of Ashes Author Tim Weiner Will Write Two More Books on National Security.”

Washington Post Book World Live,http://www.washingtonpost.com/ (July 20, 2007), chat.*