Quotes from Tim Weiner

The Russians were a nation of stage managers, Kennan wrote at the end of the war, and their deepest conviction was that things are not what they are, but only what they seemed to be.

A deep-cover squad tried to infiltrate the far left by posing as politically radicalized Vietnam veterans well supplied with guns and drugs. Four or five of them liked their new lives so much that they never came back.

The FBI was not incompetent or indifferent. It did not know what it did not know.

The Constitution has never greatly bothered any wartime president," Franklin D. Roosevelt's attorney general once wrote—and every president since has seen himself at war.

But they learned to their sorrow that their enemies could not be defeated by military might alone. Vietnam was the most bitter lesson: it was a political war, and it could not be won by force of arms. American leaders, at least some of them, would come to understand that victory or defeat in political warfare depended less on American power and statecraft than on the spirit of the people in the lands where they were waged.

Nations that had spent a thousand years under tyrants did not transform into free republics overnight because the United States wished them to do so. Elections alone did not a democracy make; they could bring strongmen to power and keep them there. Democracy, as it developed, could not be easily exported; it was not a commodity like soybeans or sneakers but an ideal that lived in the mind.

Yet the Poles were never conquered, even after the Soviets seized them. "Communism does not fit the Poles," Stalin said in 1944. "They are too individualistic." The Poles saw their history through the prism of Christ's martyrdom and resurrection. They were beautiful losers, romantic visionaries, the Irish of Eastern Europe

I need not point out that this affair represents an appalling setback," he wrote on New Year's Eve 1952. He pointed out that, in Poland and elsewhere in the Soviet orbit, the "perfection of totalitarian police state techniques is approaching '1984' efficiency to a degree where 'resistance' can probably exist only in the minds of the enslaved peoples.

The Vietnamese have a saying that you can't use a basket to cover a lion or an elephant.

The CIA's covert operations were by and large blind stabs in the dark. The agency's only course was to learn by doing—by making mistakes in battle. The CIA then concealed its failures abroad, lying to Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy. It told those lies to preserve its standing in Washington. The truth, said Don Gregg, a skilled cold-war station chief, was that the agency at the height of its powers had a great reputation and a terrible record.

As the technology of espionage expanded its horizons, the CIA's vision grew more and more myopic. Spy satellites enabled it to count Soviet weapons. They did not deliver the crucial information that communism was crumbling. The CIA's foremost experts never saw the enemy until after the cold war was over.

The agency had bled the Soviets by pouring billions of dollars of weapons into Afghanistan to help fight the Red Army's occupying forces. That was an epic success. But it failed to see that the Islamic warriors it supported would soon take aim at the United States, and when that understanding came, the agency failed to act. That was an epochal failure.

On August 21, Robert Kennedy asked McCone if the CIA could stage a phony attack on the American military base at Guantánamo Bay as a pretext for an American invasion of Cuba. McCone demurred.

The whole thing, said the President, was a paradox … of trying to meet the threat to our values and institutions by methods which themselves endangered these institutions. Here was an existential dilemma of the cold war: using undemocratic methods to defend American democracy. But Eisenhower believed that the ends would justify the means when the issue was national survival.

The great sadness," Helms said in an oral history recorded for the LBJ Library, "was our ignorance—or innocence, if you like—which led us to mis-assess, not comprehend, and make a lot of wrong decisions.

Bush casually pronounced a political death sentence upon the CIA in 2004 when he said that the agency was "just guessing" about the course of the war in Iraq. No president had ever publicly dismissed the CIA that way.

almost every president, almost every Congress, and almost every director of central intelligence since the 1960s has proved incapable of grasping the mechanics of the CIA. Most have left the agency in worse shape than they found it. Their failures have handed future generations, in the words of President Eisenhower, "a legacy of ashes." We are back where we began sixty years ago, in a state of disarray.

Six days into the debriefing, Piro questioned Saddam intensely and repeatedly about the elusive Iraqi chemical and biological arsenal that was President Bush's justification for the American invasion. Where were the weapons of mass destruction? he asked. Did they exist at all? They did not, Saddam said. It had been a long-running bluff, a deception intended to keep the Iranians, the Israelis, and the Americans at bay.

The greatest lesson was this: "What they do to us we cannot do to them," said Toomas Hendrik Ilves, the president of Estonia from 2006 to 2016. "Liberal democracies with a free press and free and fair elections are at an asymmetric disadvantage.… The tools of their democratic and free speech can be used against them.

I hope it may serve as a warning. No republic in history has lasted longer than three hundred years, and this nation may not long endure as a great power unless it finds the eyes to see things as they are in the world. That once was the mission of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Americans who know nothing of Andropov may be nonetheless familiar with aspects of the work of Service A—as is anyone who has ever heard that the CIA killed President Kennedy, or that the FBI assassinated Martin Luther King, or that the army invented the AIDS virus in a germ-warfare lab, all falsehoods broadcast and published and perpetuated by Andropov's officers and agents.

Andropov's KGB sought to change the course of history by rewriting it, to shape the policies of a foreign government and the thinking of its citizens by bending and warping them. It would steal an election when it was up for grabs, weaken the alliances of its enemies when it could, discredit foreign leaders and undermine their political institutions when it saw the opportunity. These stratagems were the core of the curriculum for Putin's education in the KGB.

Donovan told the president that he could learn the "capabilities, intentions and activities of foreign nations" while running "subversive operations abroad" against America's enemies.

They were appalled by his idea of making a spy service out of a scattershot collection of Wall Street brokers, Ivy League eggheads, soldiers of fortune, ad men, news men, stunt men, second-story men, and con men.