AFTER READING LEGACY OF ASHES: THE HISTORY OF THE CIA by Tim Weiner - 9 Lessons I Learned About Secrets, Surveillance, and the Price of National Security

AFTER READING LEGACY OF ASHES: THE HISTORY OF THE CIA by Tim Weiner - 9 Lessons I Learned About Secrets, Surveillance, and the Price of National Security In the summer of 1947, in a cramped Washington office with blinds half-drawn against the July heat, a handful of men sat around a table and imagined the future. America had just emerged from the most devastating war in human history. The country was flush with victory, but uneasy. The Soviet Union was no longer an ally but a shadowy adversary. And these men—lawyers, generals, and bureaucrats—were charged with building something unprecedented: a centralized intelligence agency, a single nerve center that would keep watch over a world suddenly divided in two. It is tempting to think that the creation of the CIA was a story of inevitability—America, the new superpower, simply doing what superpowers do. But history is never that clean. The agency that would become the CIA was born less out of foresight than out of fear, patched together from scraps of wartime spy networks, and staffed by men and women still learning the craft. Grab a copy of this book now!