CIA - mizerní agenti, skvelé PR

Herald Tribune mal v sobotu skvelú recenziu na novú knihu o americkej tajnej službe, hrubočiznú vec napísanú na základe odtajnených materiálov CIA.
Zhrnutie jednou vetou: CIA nemá za sebou prakticky žiadne významné úspechy, nedokázala predpovedať žiadnu významnú udalosť a ak sa jej občas niečo podarilo ovplyvniť, výsledok bol typu "podporme tohoto mladého ambiciózneho dôstojníka menom Saddám Husajn". Zato má však fantastický marketing a nejakým zvláštnym spôsobom sa jej podarilo vyvolať profesionálny imidž, hoci výsledky tomu nezodpovedajú.

Pár pikošiek:
- When the Berlin Wall fell, the leader of the CIA's Soviet division, was reduced to watching CNN and deflecting urgent calls from White House officials who wanted to know what the agency's spies were saying. "It was hard to confess that there were no Soviet spies worth a damn - they all had been rounded up and killed, and no one at the CIA knew why," Weiner writes. (The U.S. agents in Moscow had been betrayed by the CIA mole Aldrich Ames.)
- Donald Gregg, a former CIA station chief in South Korea, later the national security adviser to Vice President George H. W. Bush: "The record in Europe was bad. The record in Asia was bad. The agency had a terrible record in its early days - a great reputation and a terrible record."
- A fan of Ian Fleming's spy stories, John F. Kennedy was shocked to be introduced to the man described by CIA higher-ups as their James Bond - the fat, alcoholic, unstable William Harvey, who ran a botched attempt to eliminate Fidel Castro by hiring the Mafia.