In June 2007, Doubleday – a popular imprint of the Random House publishing empire – published The New York Times journalist Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes, portentously subtitled The History of the CIA. It is no exaggeration to describe the appearance of this book as a seminal event in US intelligence historiography, though perhaps not in the way that Mr Weiner intended (see Figure 6).

Historians and other scholars of intelligence will recall that the initial laudatory reviews of Legacy of Ashes – many of which were written by journalists like Weiner – were followed several months later by decidedly critical reviews written either by academic specialists in intelligence or by career intelligence officers, including a few, like myself, who have a foot in both worlds. My review of Weiner's book in the Fall 2007 issue of Studies in Intelligence – the CIA's inhouse journal, whose unclassified issues have a dedicated following among the cognoscenti of intelligence – was an early critical treatment and, thereby, became somewhat notorious, but it was by no means alone in asserting that Weiner had written a biased work of flawed scholarship. Without addressing my substantial objections regarding the book's many factual inaccuracies and its unremittingly negative perspective brought about by a tendentious use of sources, Weiner simply dismissed my review as ‘a malicious attack’ that began ‘a poison-pen campaign’ taken up by others against his book.