Ashes, Again
Tim Weiner returns with a damning chronicle of the CIA’s post-9/11 missteps, from torture to Iraq—and the impunity that followed.
THE MISSION: THE CIA IN THE 21ST CENTURY, by Tim Weiner.
Everyone loves a good spy tale. So why is it so hard to write an entertaining history of the agencies behind them?
Some of the liveliest nonfiction intelligence books focus narrowly and deeply on a single operation or episode. Two classics, Ben Macintyre’s Operation Mincemeat and David Martin’s Wilderness of Mirrors, come to mind—page-turners grounded in rigorous reporting and deft storytelling.
Far trickier is the full-scope history: compressing decades of operations, egos, and bureaucratic sprawl into something people will actually read. The tension and the derring-do that drive the plot of many a spy novel end up lost. I’m a fan of the exhaustive KGB histories based on the notes that archivist Vasili Mitrokhin hid in his floorboards and smuggled out of Russia in jam jars, but I wouldn’t recommend them to a friend with a beach chair.
Tim Weiner has now managed the balancing act twice: writing comprehensive histories of …