![]() ![]() ![]() The training I received was a very mixed bag. His reply was, “Oh, they jump out of airplanes, and are going to save the world.” I immediately applied to CIA, and reported for duty two days after my last final examination at college, in June 1951. He advised me to apply to CIA, an organization I had hardly heard of. ![]() I was interviewed in Washington by an NSA recruiter who quickly saw that I had no interest in returning to the increasingly technical field of cryptography. This led NSA to approach me in my senior year at Williams to see if I would like to resume that career. I joined the army in 1945, at the age of 17, and was trained as a cryptanalyst. My discomfort and chagrin come from the realization that things were often far worse than I had suspected them to be. ![]() The most honest answer I can give to that question is that Weiner’s meticulously researched book did not take me by surprise, and that I cannot quarrel with his basic conclusions. My wife has asked me how it made me feel to read such a litany of failure about an organization that had taken us to Saipan, Japan, Burma, Vietnam and Korea. For someone who spent 31 years as a CIA operations officer, Tim Weiner’s “Legacy of Ashes” is a painful, sometimes ugly read. ![]()
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