How the C.I.A. Lost Its Way After the Cold War
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.'
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