Review by Booklist Review
When the CIA was established in 1947, its mandate was to find facts about the world. While this mission was expanded to covert operations, its core function was to gather intelligence through espionage. Weiner (Legacy of Ashes, 2007) stresses in The Mission that the CIA is not only made up of real human beings who care deeply about keeping the U.S. safe but also obeys the president and carries out the foreign policy of the U.S. to the best of its ability. Through extensive interviews and impeccable research, Weiner delves deeply into the agency's history in this young century. He details how warnings about Al Qaeda were ignored, only to have Iraq shoehorned into every post--9/11 conversation, how the war on terror distracted from intelligence gathering about Russia and other adversarial nations, and the dangers of authoritarianism to the agency. The Mission is a masterwork of storytelling, giving a human face to a secretive institution and chronicling American foreign policy in a lively, detailed package that is accessible for a wide range of readers.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Peering behind the curtain. This masterful new history should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the CIA's place in U.S. foreign policy in the 21st century. Weiner takes us through every foreign policy crisis since 9/11 and describes the CIA's role, often in astonishing detail. Having written about intelligence and espionage for three decades at theNew York Times, his authority is formidable. His previous book on the CIA,Legacy of Ashes, won a National Book Award in 2007. Weiner's new book stands out for his unprecedented access to CIA officers past and present. As he writes in the foreword: "Among them was the man who created the CIA's secret prison system, the woman who helped take down the world's biggest nuclear-weapons technology smuggling ring, a deep-cover spy who had put presidents on his payroll, station chiefs who served on four continents, and the sitting chief of the CIA's clandestine service--a man who had been undercover for thirty-three years and had never talked to a journalist in his life." The result is a narrative that defies fiction. Among other crucial moments, the book reveals the soul-searching and finger-pointing that nearly derailed the 2013 release by the Senate Intelligence Committee of the Torture Report, which described in horrible detail the interrogation methods used in the battle against al-Qaida. The book also describes the shocking effectiveness of Russian and Chinese cyberattacks. Weiner pegs the difference between the two foes: "China wanted to know their enemies. The Russians simply want to screw them." Still, the CIA directed the multilateral decade-long intelligence operations that enabled NATO and Ukraine to prepare for and react quickly to the Russian invasion in 2023. The CIA is the most studied and misunderstood of any U.S. government agency. Weiner's book is a balanced and nuanced account that should change that. A singular triumph--an intimate chronicle of the CIA, its crises, and its opportunities since 9/11. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
