This impeccably sourced account of the secretive agency during a period of global turmoil deserves a Pulitzer
In 1976 when we were both based in Brussels, my BBC mentor, the great Charles Wheeler, came back to the office from a grand US embassy party one evening and remarked: “The cleverest and most entertaining people at these things are always CIA. Makes it all the harder to understand why they get everything wrong.” An exaggeration, of course, but one with a degree of truth to it. Why has an organisation with huge amounts of money at its disposal, a record of recruiting the brightest and the best, and the widest of remits, failed to notch up a better record? It’s true that we may not know about many of the CIA’s successes. But we know about a lot of its failures, and some of them have marked US history ineradicably.
In The Mission, Tim Weiner, whose reporting on the CIA in the New York Times was always essential reading, and whose subsequent books on the US intelligence community have a place on the shelves of anyone interested in international affairs, provides a variety of answers to this essential question. As he showed nearly 20 years ago in Legacy of Ashes, his history of the CIA from its founding in 1947 to the end of the 20th century, the agency’s position by the end of the 90s was pretty desperate. It was starved of cash and bleeding talent. A high-flyer who had been station chief in Bucharest was revealed to be working for the Russians, handing them the names of large numbers of agents and employees. But the new US administration that came in at the start of 2001 wasn’t too worried. In March that year, Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, told the joint chiefs of staff: “For the first time in decades, the country faces no strategic challenge.” Six months later came 9/11. The CIA had tried to convince the feckless George W Bush about the looming threat of Islamic ultra-fundamentalism, but no one in the administration listened. The agency was regarded as broken.
People in British intelligence are often snarky about the CIA, as poor relations tend to be. Nevertheless, some of the private criticisms made by SIS – better known as MI6 – are well observed. (Weiner’s sources inside and around the CIA are impressive and absolutely impeccable, yet he seems to have no great interest in other western intelligence agencies; apart from a few scattered references to SIS and GCHQ in The Mission, only Dutch intelligence gets much of a mention.) SIS has tended to believe that a fault line of naivety runs through the CIA: witness the way that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence led the agency by the nose in Afghanistan, persuading it to lavish funds on anti-western warlords whom the ISI supported for its own political purposes. The CIA’s eyes were only finally opened when, by good old-fashioned detective work, its agents discovered that Osama bin Laden was living alongside Pakistani top military brass in Abbottabad….
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/jul/10/the-mission-by-tim-weiner-review-unmasking-the-cia
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Alfred McCoy: To Govern the Globe – World Orders and Catastrophic Change
Alfred McCoy on the Politics of Heroin & CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade
Victor Jara murder: ex-military officers sentenced in Chile for 1973 death
More Evidence Regarding Henry Kissinger’s Lies About Chile
‘Hi, Mom. I love you’: US man kidnapped as a baby in Pinochet’s Chile reunited with family
Uki Goñi – A grandmother’s 36-year hunt for the child stolen by the Argentinian junta
Files reveal Nixon’s role in plot to block Allende from Chilean presidency
The joint CIA – MI-6 instigated coup in Iran that changed the Middle East, and the cover-up
Eve Ottenberg: Abolish the CIA
The CIA’s Intervention in Afghanistan: Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Paris, 15-21 January 1998
After the truth-shower 