And in the words of President Eisenhower George w

ASH LEGACY

By Tim Weiner.

Editions de Fallois,

544 pages, 23 euros.

Good or bad, few institutions in the world have acquired the reputation of the CIA. To the point where the hand of the Central Intelligence Agency founded after the second world war by President Truman, seems to be everywhere. Tim Weiner, journalist today at the "New York Times and Pulitzer Prize for his research on the defence and security, attaches in"Ash legacy"to a picture worrisome CIA, able to hide his mistakes under the seal of secrecy-defence.

Certainly it is not the first critical work of this institution. The literature on the subject agree. But the conclusions of the author are taken from the scrutiny of tens of thousands of documents, including many confidential records, and interviews of agents and actors of this history more of sixty years.

Created specifically for the blindness of the United States revealed by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the CIA has been very inefficient. In the eyes of Tim Weiner, the Agency has failed on many fronts. This was the case in Cuba to overthrow the Castro regime. This was also the case in the Viet Nam. The Agency has not been able, to anticipate the moment where the USSR WAC major nuclear power, or even predict, then, the implosion of the Soviet Union. It has also failed to prevent the September 11, 2001. She was misinformed on the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, before the 2003 war.

President Bush, said the author, even delivered the judgment of political death of the Agency by stating that it had that "guess" the future of the war in Iraq.

His mistakes Perhaps, as says the author, that the CIA was born with "congenital defects" hesitating in its history between intelligence and direct subversive action. The coup to the Chile against El Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973, is the evidence. However, it is not the only culprit. The blindness of policymakers also had its importance.

President George w. Bush did lend that distracted ear during the summer 2001 to CIA reports, little specific course, on the threat of a terrorist attack against American interests. Bill Clinton, leaving the keys to the White House, he was nevertheless warned: the worst threat to the United States, this is bin Laden. President Kennedy was, him, fascinated by the character of James Bond, imagining and spies from the Agency were figures of Fleming.

But there il y a eu was also at birth the obsession of the Communist threat, which, during the cold war years, it has to make mistakes and commit even to former fascists and nazis. The Communist threat was very widely misunderstood and, above all, the CIA was very difficult to establish a real network of spies across the wall. Evidenced for example by a 1961 report which refers to 500 Soviet missiles hijacked to the United States, then that at this time as there was only 4. There is also the plight of hundreds of foreign agents (Ukrainian, Russian) "parachuted" behind the wall and sent to a certain death in the 1950s in Russia, Ukraine, in the Baltic countries or Romania.

The strength of the book, some chapters read as novels of espionage, is also tracking a part of the history of the United States and their place in the world. Even if it is not far from there, a historian analysis. And in the words of President Eisenhower, George w. Bush leaves to his successor, Barack Obama, "ash legacy" and not worthy of a great power of intelligence services.