Tim Weiner offers the first definitive history of the CIA — and everything is on the record. Legacy of Ashes is based on more than 50,000 documents, primarily from the archives of the CIA itself, and hundreds of interviews with CIA veterans, including ten directors of central intelligence. It takes the CIA from its creation after World War II, through its battles in the cold war and the war on terror, to its near-collapse after 9/11. Here is the hidden history of the CIA: why eleven presidents and three generations of CIA officers have been unable to understand the world, why nearly every CIA director has left the agency in worse shape than he found it, and how these failures have profoundly jeopardized our national security.