Expert says the CIA's real problem is that 'we're Americans'
Tim Weiner, the author of Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, appeared Monday on PBS's Travis Smiley Show to discuss the future of the CIA as it reaches its 60th anniversary.
"I'm not sure there's going to be a lot of champagne being popped at CIA. These are tough times," said Weiner, noting that the CIA was demoted two years ago, after its "disastrous report on [Iraqi] weapons of mass destruction," and is "no longer first among equals."
When asked to explain what went wrong, Weiner responded that we have to disregard the "mythic, omnipotent" image of the CIA. "Here's the problem," he stated. "We're Americans. We don't speak a lot of foreign languages very well. We don't know a lot of foreign countries very deeply. We would prefer it if everybody else in the world talked like us and acted like us and thought like us."
"We're new at this," Weiner continued. "Sixty years is not a lot of time. The Chinese have been at this for 2600 years, the British for 500. And we're just getting our feet wet, really, in the business of international espionage." He stated repeatedly that as long as Americans are not interested in studying difficult languages like Arabic or Farsi and then going out and spending their lives living and working abroad, we will wind up having to buy our information from foreign countries.
Weiner added that intelligence-gathering also suffers when our reputation is at such a low ebb that nobody in other countries wants to work for us. He said the only solution for that is more diplomacy, more projection of American values, and less reliance on military power.
"The reason we won the Cold War is that American values, American freedom, American democracy were vastly superior to Soviet communism," Weiner concluded. "We're now engaged in a war that might last as long as the Cold War ... and it's not going to be a war that's fought and won with nuclear weapons, fighter bombers, or submarines. It's a war of intelligence, information, and ideas. And I think we'd better get good at it. ... We have to renew the image of America in the world. ... We are in a war that will not be won with force alone, but by the force of ideas."
The CIA has objected to Weiner's book and accused it in a press release of "distorting agency achievements."
This video is from PBS's Tavis Smiley Show, broadcast September 17.
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