E-mail a friendTim Weiner
airdate September 17, 2007
A Pulitzer Prize winner for his work on secret national security programs, New York Times journalist Tim Weiner has reported from around the world and written on American intelligence for 20 years. He spent 10 years in Washington and has traveled to some of the world's hotspots investigating CIA covert operations firsthand. Weiner is the author of Blank Check: The Pentagon's Black Budget and Legacy of Ashes, which chronicles the CIA's history. He previously worked for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Tim Weiner
Tavis: Tim Weiner is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for "The New York Times" who's spent the past 20 year researching and reporting on the CIA. As I mentioned at the top, America's spy agency turns 60 tomorrow. In advance of that comes Tim Weiner's provocative new bestseller, "Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA." Tim Weiner, nice to have you on the program.
Tim Weiner: Thank you, sir.
Tavis: Glad to have you here. Sixty years old tomorrow is the CIA - is that something to celebrate?
Weiner: I'm not sure there's gonna be a lot of champagne being popped at CIA. These are tough times. America's premiere spy service for so long, demoted from that rank two years ago; the office of director, Central Intelligence abolished, no longer first among equals, and struggling to regain its footing after 9/11 and amid the war in Iraq.
Tavis: What led, primarily, to that demotion and is it just about 9/11, or was that coming prior to 9/11?
Weiner: I think primarily as a result of the disastrous report on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that the CIA issued. A secret report - you'll remember that Colin Powell, the secretary of state, took it to the United Nations with the director of Central Intelligence sitting right over his shoulder, and said, “These are the hard facts - Iraq is brimming with chemical and biological weapons.”
Colin Powell, at the time the most trusted American worldwide. We went to war, and throughout 2003, 2004, director of central intelligence George Tenet had to come back to Colin Powell and say, "It ain't so, sorry."
Tavis: How much of that, then - that is to say, the demise of the CIA - should we earnestly lay at the feet of Colin Powell?
Weiner: None.
Tavis: None.
Weiner: None.
Tavis: I'm glad you said that - go ahead.
Weiner: No, he, in fact, was taken down in many ways by having to represent this information which turned out to be false. He's quite aware of it.
Tavis: Yeah. What do you make of the fact that there are still persons so many years later - 60 years later, in fact - who still really don't get what the CIA is all about?
Weiner: Because there's so many myths, there's so many movies, there's so many novels that create this mythical, omnipotent CIA. In fact, it's between 20 and 25,000 Americans - the number is classified - most of whom live in the suburbs of Maryland and Virginia, go to work at CIA headquarters outside of Washington every day.
About a tenth of that number - between 2,000 and 2,500 - working overseas, trying to collect information about what's going on in the world to report it to the president. Here's the problem: 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 - 60 years is not a lot of time. The Chinese have been at this for 2,600 years; the British for 500, and we're just getting our feet wet, really, in the business of international espionage.
Tavis: To your point now, though, Tim, is this tough spot that the CIA finds itself in, then, to be expected? Put another way, when the Chinese were 60 years into this versus 2,600, were they - had there been a Tim Weiner around then, would there have been a book like this written about them?
Weiner: There might have been, because intelligence is a difficult business, it's a dangerous business; it has a very high goal. In fact, the Chinese general Sun Tsu defined it in "The Art of War:" know your enemy. In addition, the CIA is supposed to report to the president about what's going on in the world, and give him and the secretary of state, secretary of Defense, the information they need to make a strategy for the United States - not for tomorrow, but for a year, five years over the horizon.
Tavis: What primarily leads to the premiere spy agency delivering to the president, to Congress, and the American people bad intel?
Weiner: I think it comes down to not knowing enough foreign languages, not knowing enough foreign cultures, not knowing enough foreign history. When we don't - we can't know the enemy if we don't speak his language, okay? As a consequence, you wind up buying or borrowing your intelligence from foreign countries, sometimes getting things lost in translation.
We need to have a whole new generation, I think, of Americans who are conversant in Arabic, Chinese, Farsi - those tough languages that bring down your grade point average - and also (laughter) the history and the culture of the countries where these languages are spoken. Then they've got to sacrifice - and this is tough; we don't have a tradition of this - by actually going out and living in those places for a generation. Then we will begin to know what's going on in the world.
Tavis: Okay, to your latter point, which I'm not gonna hold my breath about because we laughed about, of course, your joke about the languages that bring down your grade point average. A lot of what you've just described as the kind of ideal background for a good CIA agent does not describe what most Americans are interested in, are doing these days, educationally and beyond.
I raise that only because I wonder what the future of this agency is, and put another way, how the future of this agency could, in fact, be bright where we're not doing the kind of things that you said we ought to be doing, where we live in a global society and yet in many ways we're becoming more nativist, particularly since we've been attacked five, six years ago. The point is, I just don't see us doing the kind of things that you say need to be done to make this spy agency work better.
Weiner: This is not particularly a CIA problem, this is an American problem. We are a superpower; we project our power beyond our borders around the world. We need to know what's going on in the world to function, to succeed in that way. Now, we should have, I believe, in this country a crash program to educate high school students, college students, graduate students, in those languages, in those histories, in those cultures.
We need to succeed in the world, okay? Because the reason we won the Cold War is that American values, American freedom, American democracy were vastly superior to Soviet communism, okay? We're now engaged in a war that might last as long as the Cold War - 30, 40, 50 years - and it's not gonna be a war that's fought in one with nuclear weapons or fighter bombers or submarines. It's a war of intelligence, information, and ideas, and I think we'd better get good at it.
Tavis: But where this agency is concerned, what reason is there to believe that this agency can be made better if we don't do those things you're saying need to be done?
Weiner: Well, I think this is gonna be a major issue in the next presidential campaign, and it's gonna be about our position in the world, our values in the world, how we represent ourselves abroad. The CIA's part of that puzzle, okay? This is the president's service that serves to provide the president and his Cabinet with information about what's going on in the world.
During the Cold War, people from foreign countries wanted to work for the United States because we were loved and respected. Right now, our position in the world is maybe at a low ebb, and I believe the next presidential campaign is gonna have, as a core issue, the issue of how do we collect intelligence, how do we prevent the next attack, how do we know what's going on in the world, how do we win hearts and minds abroad?
Tavis: And how do you think we do that? Because there are some who believe -
Weiner: By projecting American values of freedom and democracy as well as American power.
Tavis: Okay. What people see, to your point now, is a lot of American power. What they're uncertain of, or certainly questioning, I think, is American values. How do we fix the latter?
Weiner: It's called diplomacy. The secretary of state is in charge of that. That voice has been muted of late, and it needs to be stronger. It needs to be more direct.
Tavis: Let me switch gears dramatically, because I think there's an interesting juxtaposition to be made here. Take me back to the beginning of the CIA 60 years ago, and tell me what we were doing in America then, why this agency - why somebody thought this was a good idea.
Weiner: World War II had just ended. We bestrode the world like a colossus. The Soviets had lost 27 million dead in the war, and yet the threat of Soviet communism was ever-present in the world. And shortly after our victory in World War II, our ally against Hitler became our enemy - the Soviets. And the war was fought - the Cold War was fought not with nuclear weapons, thank God, but in almost every country on Earth for the hearts and minds of the developing world. Not just western Europe or Latin America, but throughout Africa and Asia, and thank God we won.
Tavis: Are there parallels to be drawn between the CIA 60 years ago and 60 years later?
Weiner: The craft of espionage was new to us. We had never had a civilian intelligence service in this country, and some of the techniques were known, but their applications were not. There were a handful - several thousand - veterans of World War II who had worked in espionage, but they were mostly working in Western Europe.
Today, we have a whole new enemy. It's not a nation, it's not a country, it's not an army as we think of an army. It is a loose confederation of tribes who are furious with American power and have an apocalyptic vision of the world. And yes, they wanna hurt us, and they wanna hurt western interests around the world.
So in many ways, the enemy is harder to know. You have to know his language, you have to know his mind, you have to know where he lives. You have to get inside his camp.
Tavis: Twice now, Tim, you've suggested that we have to be serious about winning the hearts, the souls, and the minds of people around the world.
Weiner: I believe that's true.
Tavis: I believe you're right about that. The question is whether or not you think our intelligence community, to say nothing of our leadership - the political leadership - is the intelligence community interested in doing that? I assume they're aware of that, but are they interested in doing that?
Weiner: Yes, and they can't do it alone. It has to be done in concert with the White House, the military, the State Department and our diplomats. We have to renew the image of America in the world. We are not just the most powerful force on Earth militarily; the ideals of our Constitution, of our Bill of Rights, the ideas of American democracy - we need to remind people in the world what they are.
Tavis: Finally, I'd be remiss - and I'm certain that I would get a bunch of email from my friends - well, I don't have friends in the CIA, but folk in the CIA (laughs) if I didn't at least give you an opportunity to tell me something good about the CIA. They've been around 60 years, so obviously, with all the - to the beginning of our conversation, all the movies and all the books that have been written about the CIA -
Weiner: All the myths.
Tavis: All the - yeah, the plot line - tell me something good about the CIA.
Weiner: The CIA was actually right about the war in Vietnam in that they told two presidents - Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon - that this war could not be won by military means. That it was political warfare, and that it wasn't going to be won with tanks or bombs or American military power. We may be approaching a similar position today in that we are in a war that will not be won with force alone, but by the force of ideas.
Tavis: And will the CIA tell that to the next president?
Weiner: If the president listens.
Tavis: "Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA," from the Pulitzer Prize-winner Tim Weiner of "The New York Times." Tim, congratulations, nice to have you on the program.
Weiner: My pleasure, thank you for having me.
Tavis: Glad to have you here.
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