THE MISSION: The CIA in the 21st Century, by Tim Weiner
On the evening of June 21, President Trump took to the airwaves to announce that his secret directive for the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities had just been carried out. “Tonight,” he proclaimed, “I can report to the world that the strikes were a spectacular military success,” with those facilities “completely and totally obliterated.”
Trump’s triumphalist tone was swiftly undercut by a preliminary Defense Intelligence Agency analysis that found the airstrikes had caused limited damage, and likely set back Iran’s nuclear capabilities by a mere few months. The furious president not only doubled down on his “obliterated” claim but insisted that further analysis would confirm it. Sure enough, his Central Intelligence Agency director, John Ratcliffe, soon scurried forward to cast doubt on the D.I.A.’s assessment and to insist that “new intelligence” from an unidentified source confirmed the sites had been “severely damaged,” not quite Trump’s adverb of choice, but close.
Nothing on the ground is any clearer now, but to many observers one thing is: These events served as yet another example of the rank politicization of America’s pre-eminent intelligence agency.
As Tim Weiner demonstrates in “The Mission,” his latest account of misadventure at the C.I.A., this trend is likely only to accelerate with Trump in the White House. Both as a onetime reporter for The New York Times and as a book author, Weiner has made tracking the fluctuating fortunes of the American intelligence community his life’s work. His masterly “Legacy of Ashes,” detailing the C.I.A.’s first half-century, won a National Book Award in 2007. “The Mission” picks up where that book left off, narrating the agency’s history well beyond the fall of communism. It is exhaustive and prodigiously researched, but also curiously ungainly.
The story begins in the 1990s. Grasping for a new mission in the wake of the Cold War, the C.I.A. played a supporting role in the war on drugs, and then, after the 9/11 attacks, the war on terror. Agents hunted for the Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and tortured high-value prisoners in hopes of gaining information on future attacks. Much of the testimony, Weiner writes, was gathered by a quickly raised army of often inexperienced interrogators. “If people thought we did something illegal, something immoral,” a former C.I.A. official, James Cotsana, who reportedly oversaw such interrogations, tells Weiner, “we’ll live with it. I’ll live with it.”
One theme in “Legacy of Ashes” was the contention that nearly every C.I.A. director left the agency worse off than he found it. Weiner suggests this pattern has persisted into the 21st century, largely because of political pressure being brought to bear on intelligence work. Such pressure was most flagrantly revealed in the lead-up to the American invasion of Iraq over the false claim that the country’s ruler, Saddam Hussein, possessed weapons of mass destruction.
The Bush administration adviser Scooter Libby, for instance, was “so devoted to the cause of war,” Weiner writes, “that he vengefully outed an undercover C.I.A. officer whose husband, a former ambassador, had undermined the argument that Saddam was building a nuclear bomb.” (Libby has denied any wrongdoing, though he was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in the case and later pardoned by President Trump.) At the same time, Weiner notes, intelligence officers often felt their intelligence was beside the point. As one former C.I.A. Iraq operations chief insists, “These guys would have gone to war if Saddam had a rubber band and a paper clip.”
Politics is one thing. Ego is another. Throughout “The Mission,” Weiner hammers on an agency that seems to be repeatedly blinded by its sense of American supremacy. In the past decade and a half, the C.I.A. has been caught off guard again and again, including in China, where the country’s intelligence services apparently excel at rooting out and killing American assets. The agency was also back-footed by the onset of the Arab Spring uprisings in 2010, Weiner writes, because U.S. spies depended on the accuracy of information coming from aging counterparts within the dictatorial regimes that were about to crumble in the unrest.
Weiner saves his greatest scorn, however, for the first Trump administration, detailing both the vast web of contacts between his campaign staff and Russian intelligence officials as well as Trump’s subsequent efforts to bring the C.I.A. to heel, even as he leaned on his intelligence advisers to vet his rash proposals. “How would we do,” Trump’s first C.I.A. director, Mike Pompeo, later recalled the president musing, “if we went to war with Mexico?”
For all his book’s breadth and timeliness, Weiner seems to have given scant thought to guiding his readers through the labyrinth. One questionable choice was to tell his tale largely chronologically. This is a common authorial device, of course, but the difficulty here is that amid an unending onslaught of new names and situations, the reader is granted few clues as to who or what will prove important later. Over the course of just 10 pages in Chapter 2, for example, at least 15 different C.I.A. officers and lawyers are introduced even though many will not be heard from again for dozens of pages, if ever.
One effect of this surfeit of detail is that “The Mission” begins to feel quite insiderish. It also becomes hard to decide which voices to trust, since many of those quoted or interviewed seem mainly intent on taking potshots at their rivals or portraying themselves as blameless for one mishap or another.
Still, there is something simultaneously illuminating and saddening in contemplating the course the C.I.A. has traveled during the past quarter-century. Weiner clearly has great affection for many of the intelligence officers he has interviewed over the years, and some of his book’s most poignant passages describe the crises of faith that beset many of them during the war on terror — their moral struggles over the torture of prisoners or the drone attacks on suspected terrorists in which innocent civilians are often collateral victims. Such soul-searching also carries a whiff of quaintness when set against the venality of American foreign policy today.
In this regard, one episode Weiner recounts stands out. In 2007, the C.I.A. gathered compelling evidence that Syria, no friend of the United States, was well on its way to building a nuclear weapon. The news set off a spirited debate within the Bush administration over whether it should launch a pre-emptive strike to eliminate the site — in other words, a surprise attack against a nation with which the United States was not at war. The idea was vehemently opposed by one of Bush’s closest advisers — “We don’t do Pearl Harbors” — and the bombing scheme was shelved (though it was subsequently taken over by a country willing to do the job: Israel).
Compare that with Trump’s “Pearl Harbor” assault on Iran’s nuclear facilities even though the C.I.A. and almost every other Western intelligence agency had concluded that Iran was not developing a nuclear weapon. The attack starkly underscored just how shamelessly the American intelligence community has already succumbed to Trump’s will. In this regard, Weiner’s warnings about the peril facing both the C.I.A. and the United States seem prophetic.
THE MISSION: The CIA in the 21st Century | By Tim Weiner | Mariner | 454 pp. | $35
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