YDSTIE: And as you said, Dulles still in control of the agency, the Bay of Pigs occurs and a guy named Richard Bissell was really in charge of that operation. To see a president eviscerating a director of central intelligence before an audience of cabinet members, there's blood on the page. WEINER: And four months later came the Bay of Pigs. YDSTIE: One anecdote about Allen Dulles, I think, is also very revealing - how he treated the briefers that came to talk to him each day. He believed in dignified publicity because he wanted to create and burnish a public image for the CIA so that it could survive its infancy and its youth and grow up to be a permanent, powerful part of the American government. WEINER: Allen Dulles really didn't want to have a secret intelligence agency. But a close look at Dulles's tenure provides a very different picture. YDSTIE: Maybe the most famous CIA leader is Allen Dulles, and as you suggest in your book, he charmed political leaders here at home and editors and publishers as well, which gave the CIA a reputation as a competent and effective agency. And during the first 15 years running up to the Bay of Pigs, there were plenty. They had to learn by doing and learn from their mistakes. They didn't really know what they were doing. He didn't stop and say this isn't working, we're sacrificing lives.

YDSTIE: What's astounding about this is that Wisner sent people in and never heard from them again and he kept doing it. And they put them into planes and they strapped on parachutes and they flung them out into the darkness. WEINER: And instead they took thousands of recruited foreign agents, Koreans, Chinese, other Asians, and hundreds of recruited foreign agents from Eastern and Central Europe and Russia. YDSTIE: And Wisner actually sacrificed hundreds of lives trying to do this during the Korean War. And that got the United States into a good deal of trouble.

He was interested in covert action, making kings and breaking them, changing the world instead of knowing the world. TIM WEINER: Frank Wisner was not interested in espionage, which is the core mission of the CIA. Weiner says men like Frank Wisner virtually invented America's clandestine service in the first days of the Cold War. In a new history of the CIA called 'Legacy of Ashes,' New York Times reporter Tim Weiner traces some of the failings of the CIA today back to that founding generation. One of those originals, Frank Wisner, was a lawyer, a World War II spy, and a man who by the end of the 1950s would go mad. It overthrew foreign governments, even attempted to assassinate foreign leaders, actions that are now recalled more with embarrassment than pride. Under them, in the 1950s, America's spy agency launched audacious operations. At the dawn of the Cold War, Allen Dulles, Richard Bissell and Frank Wisner were considered daring, imaginative and brilliant.

Legacy of Ashes by Tim Weiner