The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century

In this triumphant follow-up to Legacy of Ashes, National Book Award winner Weiner continues his history of the CIA. He begins at the turn of the 21st century, when some believed the agency, sunk into post–Cold War listlessness, “was at the point of failure” and might only be resurrected “after some appalling catastrophe.” That catastrophe arrived on Sept 11, 2001, in the form of a terrorist attack all but predicted by then CIA director David Tenet, who had failed to convince the Bush administration to take Al Qaeda seriously. By November, American bombs were killing Taliban foot soldiers, but, beyond that, “no strategy was in place.” Bush’s preoccupation with Iraq and failure to order a military dragnet for Osama bin Laden created a strategic vacuum into which the CIA fatefully stepped. Looking to extract intelligence on bin Laden from detainees, the agency implemented a set of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” codifying torture as a “government institution.” After Barack Obama’s 2008 election, “to the muted astonishment” of the CIA’s leaders, “little would change,” Weiner writes, noting that Obama “closed the secret prisons,” but in exchange “chose to incinerate America’s enemies, rather than incarcerate them,” expanding the agency’s drone strike program. Weiner chillingly concludes by asserting that the CIA’s repeated legal line crossing has turned the American president, who gives the agency its “marching orders,” into “a king above the law”; he quotes “CIA veterans” who speculate that the president could even “deploy a paramilitary group” without repercussion. It’s a crucial document of the present times. (July)