In December, 1988, as the Soviet Union was beginning to come apart, Senator Bill Bradley, a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, convened a closed-door hearing with several of the C.I.A.’s top Soviet experts. These were analysts, not operatives. They did not run spies or weapons, or shoot poisoned darts at people; mostly, they sat at their desks at Langley, reading Pravda or studying photographs of Soviet military parades. The hearing found them in a melancholy mood, pondering life without the U.S.S.R. “The Soviet Union is so fundamental to our outlook on the world, to our concept of what is right and wrong in politics,” Douglas J. MacEachin, who ran the C.I.A.’s office of Soviet analysis, said, “that major change in the U.S.S.R. is as significant as some major change in the sociological fabric of the United States itself.” And so, MacEachin explained, a C.I.A. analyst struggled to see things clearly; not only his world view but his livelihood was at stake. If the Soviet Union disappeared, what would become of those who made their careers analyzing it? “There are not many homes for old wizards of Armageddon,” MacEachin said.
Soon enough, the Soviet Union collapsed with a whimper, and the United States stood alone. Perceiving no enemies on the near horizon, the nation stopped looking for them so fervently. Budgets were cut, retirements suggested. Agents in the field were brought in from the cold. Bill Clinton, the first post-Cold War President, was elected to fix the economy. So infrequent were Clinton’s meetings with his first C.I.A. director, James Woolsey, that when a small plane crashed onto the White House lawn, in the fall of 1994, people joked that it must be Woolsey, trying to get an audience with the President.
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History was over. Humanity had resolved most major questions. The great rivalries of the age were between Biggie and Tupac, “Friends” and “Seinfeld.” When, in the late nineteen-nineties, Al Qaeda began mounting ever more sophisticated terror attacks—bombing two American embassies in East Africa, in 1998, and then blowing a giant hole in the hull of a Navy ship, the U.S.S. Cole, in 2000—it took some time to adjust. George W. Bush, in the first six and a half months of his Presidency, received thirty-six C.I.A. briefings on Al Qaeda. This was a lot of briefings—perhaps too many. If Al Qaeda was always about to launch an attack on American soil, would it ever actually attack? Then, on a cloudless morning in September, hijackers seized four planes on the Eastern Seaboard and flew two of them into the World Trade Center. History was back, and so was the C.I.A.
The journalist Tim Weiner begins his new book, “The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century” (Mariner), amid the steady but fruitless drumbeat of intelligence about Al Qaeda, and then, following the attacks, the overwhelming response. Two days after the Twin Towers fell, the C.I.A. counterterrorism chief, Cofer Black—a large, charismatic former covert operative known for his imposing presence and already several years into the hunt for Osama bin Laden—gave a thrilling presentation to Bush and his national-security team. He promised to defeat Al Qaeda within weeks. “Bin Laden, dead,” he said. “Zawahiri, dead.” He added, “When we’re through with them, they’ll have flies walking across their eyeballs.”
Bush ate it up. Speaking to reporters at the Pentagon a few days later, he leaned in to his Texas drawl and said that bin Laden was wanted “dead or alive.” The C.I.A. analyst Michael Morell, who served as the President’s daily briefer and would later become the acting director of the agency, was less enthusiastic. “He cannot deliver on that promise,” Morell recalled thinking about Black. “We don’t have that kind of intelligence. We don’t have the capability to do that.” It was the ancient yin and yang of the C.I.A. Operatives were adventuresome; analysts were cautious. Presidents, unsurprisingly, preferred the adventuresome. And so the C.I.A. went to war in Afghanistan.
Weiner is a longtime national-security correspondent with a specialty in intelligence. His first book on the subject was about Aldrich Ames, the Soviet mole inside the C.I.A., who, before finally being ferreted out by the F.B.I., in 1994, handed over the identities of dozens of agency assets. When the K.G.B. learned from him the names of Soviet citizens spying for the U.S., it shot them. Weiner visited him in jail shortly after his arrest, and Ames maintained that he had done what he did not for money but for peace.
Weiner’s best-known book, “Legacy of Ashes” (2007), is a history of the C.I.A.’s first sixty years—a chronicle of analytical failures and harebrained operations that made the agency seem less diabolical than daffy. He found not only a divide between the Directorate of Analysis and the clandestine Directorate of Operations, but a further divide within the clandestine service itself. Was the mission to use tradecraft to gather intelligence, or to use money, propaganda, and violence to shape events? Was the point to know the world or to change it? Increasingly, as the decades passed, the answer tilted toward the latter. In the name of fighting communism, the C.I.A. put its thumb on the scale of the 1948 elections in Italy, overthrew elected leaders in Iran and Guatemala, and generally ran roughshod through the Global South. The 1953 coup in Iran—which toppled Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and handed ruling power to what had previously been a constitutional monarchy—was, in Weiner’s account, a Pyrrhic victory: it gave the agency and its masters the dangerous impression that this was something they could pull off at will.
Covert action became a regular Presidential recourse. One could see the appeal. It was far less noisy than sending B-2 bombers or your Secretary of State. If it went well, great; if it failed, you could often pretend that it had never happened. And failure was frequent. Throughout the early Cold War, the C.I.A. parachuted émigrés into Albania, China, North Korea, and Soviet Ukraine, hoping to gather information and maybe even spark some sort of resistance; the operatives were usually captured and never heard from again. But the C.I.A. kept trying. J.F.K., only recently sworn in, acceded to a half-baked C.I.A. scheme left over from the Eisenhower Administration: several battalions of Cuban exiles would land at a Cuban inlet known as the Bay of Pigs and topple Fidel Castro. This turned out to be easier said than done. The fiasco was immediate and public, but, even after the rout, Kennedy kept pressing the agency to assassinate Castro. L.B.J., inheriting Kennedy’s Vietnam mess, found himself in a bind of his own. As Weiner recounts, Johnson was convinced that Saigon would fall without American support, but he didn’t want to commit huge numbers of troops. At the same time, it was politically unthinkable to be seen to have pulled out. Covert action was, in Weiner’s words, “the only path between war and diplomacy,” and so the agency became drawn ever deeper into the mire.
An organization devoted to secrecy ends up with a lot of secrets. The C.I.A. did its best to keep its own hidden—from the Warren Commission, from people in other parts of the agency, and, of course, from Congress. The C.I.A. operated like a besieged, landlocked country, surrounded by rivals and foes. Its goal was to fight communism, but you couldn’t do that if Congress cut your funding or the Pentagon gobbled you up. The audience that mattered most was the President. In 1975, at a rare moment of introspection in American politics, Senator Frank Church wondered whether the C.I.A. had become a “rogue elephant on a rampage.” The answer, actually, was no. Almost always, the orders came from the top. Presidents didn’t like to hear bad news, and smart C.I.A. directors learned to withhold it. Richard Nixon, despite his contempt for the C.I.A. (“They’ve got forty thousand people over there reading newspapers”), ordered it to come up with a psychological profile of Daniel Ellsberg and to try to prevent Salvador Allende from getting elected. Ronald Reagan charged it with arming the Contras. Even the sweet, saintly Jimmy Carter, who cancelled a number of the agency’s more odious operations, signed a covert-action order to send weapons to resistance groups after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The arms were routed through Pakistani intelligence, which favored the most committed and fanatical Afghan fighters. When the Soviets left, the holy warriors, and the weaponry, remained.
The story of the C.I.A. that Weiner tells in “The Mission” closely resembles the one he told in “Legacy of Ashes.” At the start of the war on terror, as at the start of the Cold War, intelligence was at a premium. “Our knowledge of what the other side was up to, their intentions, their capabilities, was nil, or next to it,” one of the C.I.A.’s early directors told Weiner about the Soviets. The situation with Al Qaeda was similar. Weiner quotes Bob Gates, a Soviet analyst who became the agency’s director and later Secretary of Defense: “We didn’t know jack shit about al Qaeda. That’s the reason a lot of this stuff happened, the interrogations and everything else, because we didn’t know anything. If we’d had a great database and knew exactly what al Qaeda was all about, what their capabilities were and stuff like that, some of these measures wouldn’t have been necessary.”
Like the Cold War, the war on terror kept expanding. By the time it was over, the U.S. had conducted antiterrorism trainings in as many as a hundred and fifty countries, deployed combat troops in at least fifteen, and launched drone strikes in at least seven. The most fateful expansion was into Iraq. In the lead-up to that invasion, under intense pressure, the C.I.A. told the White House what it wanted to hear: that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. (It didn’t.) The episode, to which Weiner devotes considerable space, remains a black mark on the agency, but it’s not as if Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were holding their breath in anticipation of a Colin Powell speech to the United Nations. As one former operative tells Weiner, “These guys would have gone to war if Saddam had a rubber band and a paper clip that could put your eye out.”
From the first, the fixation on Iraq interfered with the mission to destroy Al Qaeda. Reporting for the Times in Afghanistan in late 2001, Weiner heard from a local official that bin Laden was hiding in Tora Bora—travelling on horseback by night, sleeping in caves. The same official had, it turned out, told the same thing to the C.I.A., which had relayed it to General Tommy Franks, the top U.S. commander. But Franks, who later said that he was getting multiple intelligence reports of bin Laden in multiple places, didn’t act on the information. “Bin Laden was definitely there,” Weiner writes, and we missed him. “In the general’s defense,” he goes on, “he was distracted.” Rumsfeld had just ordered Franks—less than three months after September 11th—to create a plan for the invasion of Iraq. Bin Laden disappeared into Pakistan. It would take the C.I.A. a decade before it got another solid lead as to his whereabouts.
The overwhelming need to know the enemy, lest he attack without warning, eventually led, during both the Cold War and the war on terror, to the same place: torture. It was the dark, or darker, side of running human assets. In March, 2002, the agency got hold of an Al Qaeda associate known as Abu Zubaydah and flew him to a secret prison in Thailand. There, an F.B.I. agent named Ali Soufan, a fluent Arabic speaker, won his trust and learned a great deal. Zubaydah revealed that the 9/11 attacks had been orchestrated by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, described Al Qaeda’s money-smuggling operations, and even mentioned outlandish future plots—like a plan to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge, inspired by a group viewing of the 1998 “Godzilla.”
Then the C.I.A. began interrogating Zubaydah. Agents “stripped him naked, chained him hand and foot to the floor, and blasted death metal music in his ears,” Weiner writes. They kept him awake for seventy-six hours, until medics intervened. They built a coffin around him. None of it worked. Soufan phoned F.B.I. headquarters and threatened to arrest the psychologist the C.I.A. had hired to run its “enhanced interrogation”; instead, Soufan was pulled out and recalled to the U.S. The interrogation continued. After receiving Presidential approval, the interrogators waterboarded Zubaydah for four days. They poured water down his throat and up his nose until he thought he would drown. “I have nothing more,” he pleaded. “I give you everything.” He nearly died. Finally, to make it stop, he started inventing things. The interrogators relented. All this was videotaped. Three years later, fearing that the tapes would leak, the head of the counterterrorism division at the time of the torture, Jose A. Rodriguez, and his deputy, Gina Haspel, ordered that the tapes be destroyed.
Weiner captures the mood of dread that gripped Washington in the aftermath of September 11th, when most in the national-security establishment were convinced that a “second wave” of Al Qaeda attacks was imminent. They missed the crucial point that better intelligence could have provided. Al Qaeda did plan further strikes, some of which the C.I.A. eventually thwarted, but the first attack had already achieved its aims: it dragged the U.S. into a protracted war in Afghanistan, pushed the country back into the moral swamp of torture, and, as a bonus, helped goad America into invading Iraq.
Barack Obama’s election, in 2008, changed things less than some people had hoped. He put an end to torture, drew down forces in Iraq, and, when the C.I.A., after years of painstaking detective work, finally found bin Laden in a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, authorized the SEAL-team mission that killed him. But, in the broader war on terror, he merely replaced torture with drone strikes. These killed a lot of Al Qaeda operatives and people who hung out with them, such as their families. The drone strikes were, in a way, the opposite of torture—distanced rather than intimate, wiping out everything in the blast radius rather than trying to extract every last molecule of knowledge—but they had the same effect. They were immoral; outside the United States, they were unpopular; and they did not win the war.
The night before the September 11th attacks, the New York real-estate mogul Donald Trump attended Marc Jacobs’s spring fashion show in the meatpacking district, along with fellow-celebrities Sarah Jessica Parker and Monica Lewinsky. Just hours after the attacks, he was interviewed by a local TV station. One of the anchors asked him whether his property at 40 Wall Street had been damaged by the collapse of the Twin Towers. Trump said no and added that his building was now the tallest in downtown Manhattan.
Trump emerged as a national figure out of the ingredients of a peculiarly American cauldron: real estate, high-profile business dealings, reality TV—and the war on terror. Long before he ran for President, he had a lot to say about whom and what and how we were fighting. He thought that the U.S. was not prosecuting the war viciously enough. He thought that torture was just fine. And he thought, or claimed to think, that Obama was not born in the United States, and hinted darkly that he might, in fact, be a Muslim. Trump used, as Obama was not willing to use, the phrase “radical Islamic terror” to describe the enemy. As Spencer Ackerman wrote in “Reign of Terror” (2021), the phrase turned a geopolitical contest into a race war and “extracted the precious nativist metal from the husk of the Forever War.” It excited Trump’s future base.
The predominant intelligence story of Trump’s first Presidential run was, of course, Russian interference in the election. Years later, we still haven’t fully digested what actually happened and what it meant. Did the Russian operation sway the results? Even if it didn’t, what does it say that so many around Trump seemed willing to play along? Was this any worse than the dirty tricks of American politics past? For years, liberals followed a trail of crumbs from Paul Manafort to Konstantin Kilimnik to Oleg Deripaska, convinced that, somewhere, a smoking gun would be found. The fantasy was Watergate redux: nail down the connections, show how “high up” collusion went, and Trump’s Presidency would collapse under the weight of scandal. If only we could establish that Trump’s pal Roger Stone was in contact with WikiLeaks, which was talking to the Russians, who had hacked Hillary Clinton’s e-mails at Vladimir Putin’s direction—then the mystery would be solved, the nightmare over.
But clarity never came. There were too many cutouts and complications. G.R.U. hackers working for Putin were a far cry from the C.I.A.-linked burglars who broke into D.N.C. offices for Nixon; WikiLeaks was a media organization, arguably. Meanwhile, Obama was too careful; Senate Republicans were too truculent; the Steele dossier created unrealistic expectations. Even if we’d had perfect information, fully publicized, it probably would not have mattered. Trump, in front of the television cameras, had urged the Russians—“if you’re listening”—to find Hillary’s e-mails. His poll numbers were unaffected by this apparent solicitation of illicit foreign intervention.
Fifteen years of the war on terror had done a lot to corrode political trust in the United States. If you’d been primed to believe that Obama was a secret Muslim or that Democrats were in league with Radical Islamic Terror, then working with the Russians to educate the public about Democratic leaders hardly seemed out of bounds. And then—unlike, say, the stories once told by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth—at least the e-mails published by WikiLeaks were real.
Trump’s first term brought a curious reversal in the C.I.A.’s public image. He repeatedly clashed with the agency over his view on Russian election interference. “President Putin says it’s not Russia,” Trump said at a summit with the Russian President in Helsinki. “I don’t see any reason why it would be.” He proved uninterested in much of the C.I.A.’s other work, as well. John Bolton, Trump’s longest-serving national-security adviser, later wrote of Trump’s weekly reports from his intelligence chiefs, “I didn’t think these briefings were terribly useful, and neither did the intelligence community, since much of the time was spent listening to Trump, rather than Trump listening to the briefers.”
Various former officials went public with their concerns about Trump, some labelling him a threat to national security. Several “formers,” as they’re called, became fixtures of liberal Resistance media. It was, notably, a C.I.A. agent detailed to the White House who blew the whistle on Trump’s “perfect phone call” with Volodymyr Zelensky, in 2019. Were C.I.A. agents now the good guys? Trump’s second C.I.A. director, Gina Haspel, nominated in part because Trump admired her work on the torture program, resisted his attempts to suborn the agency, especially in the wake of the 2020 election. She warned that Trump was attempting to mount a “right-wing coup.” It’s now clear that, as bad as things got in January of 2021, they could have been a whole lot worse.
The C.I.A. was a step behind during Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, but it did manage to confirm—through an agency asset inside the Kremlin, Oleg Smolenkov—that Putin was the one orchestrating it. (The agency was worried that Smolenkov would be exposed, possibly by Trump, and is presumed to have exfiltrated the asset and his family by yacht from a putative vacation in Montenegro during the summer of 2017.) A few years later, though, when Putin began amassing troops on Ukraine’s border, the agency was in its element. At the time, in the fall of 2021, many experts did not think that a full-scale invasion was likely. After all, Putin had sporadically concentrated forces at the border before, then brought them home. The C.I.A. had a different analysis. It had satellite imagery of the troop buildup; it knew from sources near the Kremlin that the government was investing money in reserve forces and military contingency planning; it eventually got something very close to the actual war plan. All these factors pointed to an invasion. The C.I.A. sounded the alarm, and in the course of several months urged the Europeans and, to some extent, the Ukrainians, to prepare for war.
It was a major intelligence victory for the agency—“a return to its central mission,” according to Weiner—though it failed to deter the invasion itself. In November, 2021, the C.I.A. director, William J. Burns, a Biden appointee who’d previously been a senior U.S. diplomat, travelled to Moscow to try to talk Putin out of going to war. He brought all the intelligence the C.I.A. had gathered and warned of the consequences if Putin were to go ahead. The Russian President was “utterly unapologetic,” Burns recalled. Putin believed that his army would roll into Ukraine with minimal opposition. There was nothing anyone could do to stop him. Knowledge is power, but, as it turns out, there are other kinds of power. It also turned out that Putin’s intelligence on Ukraine was a lot worse than the C.I.A.’s intelligence on him.
After Burns’s mission failed, the C.I.A. shared everything it knew with the Ukrainians. Once war began, the agency helped locate Russian troops, kill Russian generals, and run covert ops in occupied Ukrainian territory. The C.I.A. had once desperately tried to infiltrate Soviet Ukraine, leading to the torture and deaths of dozens of men. Now the agency could work hand in glove with Ukrainian intelligence officers inside Ukraine to hinder the Russian invasion.
Trump’s return to office throws the C.I.A.’s success in Ukraine—and much else—into doubt. This time, Trump has made sure to put a loyalist in charge of the agency: the former Texas congressman John Ratcliffe, who promptly eliminated the agency’s diversity-hiring program—a remarkably self-defeating move for a global superpower. “For more than forty years,” Weiner writes, “the clandestine service had been trying to recruit and retain African American, Arab American, and Asian American officers, on the sound basis that sending an all-white cadre to spy in places like Somalia, Pakistan, or China was terrible tradecraft.” When Elon Musk’s DOGE requested employee names from government agencies, Ratcliffe failed to protect C.I.A. personnel, submitting a list of agents which included their real first names—a potential security risk. After America bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities, and a Defense Intelligence Agency leak undercut the Administration’s claims about the strikes’ effectiveness, it was Ratcliffe who came forward to uphold the official line.
There was a time when the C.I.A.’s existential fear was of losing its adversary. In Al Qaeda, it found a new one; in Iraq, it created others. In Trump, it faces an adversary of a different kind. Weiner concludes his book by expressing his faith in the agency’s rank and file, but with a clear sense of foreboding. If a genuine emergency were to take place, and Trump tried to use the occasion to cancel elections or declare martial law, who would be able to stop him? What if he tried to make the C.I.A. great again? “Who would disobey him,” Weiner asks, “if he ordered the clandestine service to rebuild the secret prisons, overthrow a sovereign nation, or assassinate his political enemies?” Historically, Weiner writes, the C.I.A. has not directly defied orders. But individuals have blown the whistle, resigned in protest, and spoken to journalists. There may not be homes for old wizards of Armageddon, but surely there is space for them on MSNBC. ♦
