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 the CIA that are both deeply reported and compulsively readable.
The first, Legacy of Ashes, chronicled the Agency’s Cold War debacles—from parachuting thousands of agents into death traps in Korea to the post-9/11 intelligence failures that helped pave the road to war in Iraq. It won a National Book Award for nonfiction and so angered Langley that the CIA’s in-house journal, Studies in Intelligence, published a 5,000-word rebuttal urging readers to steer clear. Which only helped move more copies.
His new book, The Mission, picks up where Legacy left off. It follows the CIA into the post-9/11 wars, charting its ever-expanding mandate, exploding budget, and ever-murkier consequences. It’s arguably the tougher assignment, given the lack of declassified archives and official oral histories to draw from. But Weiner, a veteran of The New York Times who won a Pulitzer at The Philadelphia Inquirer, navigates the terrain with clarity and authority, rendering scenes and decisions that might otherwise be lost to acronym and abstraction.
Where a lesser writer might drown in detail, Weiner cuts through with sharp, confident judgment. The Mission is unsparing, particularly in its portrait of Director George Tenet, who tried to scrub the stain of failing to stop 9/11 by helping sell the false case for war in Iraq. Chomping a dead cigar, exhausted after six years at the helm, Tenet “saw waves of reality slowly eroding the CIA’s sand castle of conjectures about the weapons of mass destruction,” Weiner writes. A few spies thought that if the CIA were a military organization, “they would have been court-martialed.”
That failure—and the lack of any real consequences—is one of the book’s major through-lines. Colin Powell’s reputation never recovered from the bad intel Tenet put in his hands. Tenet lied to Congress, according to his own inspector general, and sealed his legacy by declaring that the case for Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction was a “slam dunk.” He got the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Counterterrorism chief Jose Rodriguez was explicitly told not to destroy 92 videotapes showing CIA torture. He did it anyway. An investigation went nowhere. The officer who carried out that order, Gina Haspel, later became CIA director herself. Again and again, the story repeats itself.
Is it all unremitting failure? No. The CIA did find Osama bin Laden and other terrorist leaders after years of painstaking work. There’s the elegant, nine-year covert operation that helped dismantle A.Q. Khan’s global nuclear smuggling network. Another bright spot was Ukraine. For more than a decade, the Agency helped build a world-class Ukrainian intelligence service, providing everything from a new headquarters to advanced training in North Carolina and the creation of a paramilitary unit. The investment paid off when Russian tanks rolled in. Ukraine’s spy services played a critical role in helping repel the 2022 invasion and became one of America’s most valuable sources on Russia. The war, Weiner writes, brought the CIA “back to its roots.” If so, one can’t help but wonder where it is these days.
Could The Mission stand to highlight more CIA successes? Possibly. But as Weiner made clear in Legacy, the old saw about the CIA’s failures being public and its successes secret is only half true. Often, the failures were secret, too. And when they justify the case for a war that kills 4,600 American service members and nearly 200,000 civilians, they deserve the scrutiny they get.
A narrative needs vivid characters. Weiner introduces us to Greg Vogle, a star paramilitary officer who briefed new arrivals by saying, “Your mission is to kill al Qaida. Any questions?” Michael D’Andrea, the chain-smoking, Muslim-convert counterterrorism chief, became “by any measure the most lethal officer in CIA history,” credited with launching drone strikes that killed thousands of terrorists. Weiner is the first to publish the name of legendary clandestine service chief Tomas Rakusan, who infiltrated Baghdad before the 2003 invasion by posing as a Czech security official. On the other side of the ledger, there is the aloof Porter Goss, ”absent when physically present,” whose 18-month reign as director began with a political purge of senior CIA leadership and ended with FBI crime-scene tape strung across CIA headquarters and his No. 3, Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, on his way to prison for corruption.
Full disclosure: I got to know Weiner during his work on this book when he took an interest in some of the reporting I’ve done on this Substack. Weiner adds new depth to the case of Manadel al-Jamadi, one of the CIA’s “ghost” prisoners in Iraq, who died in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison with his shoulders “almost literally coming out of their sockets.” It was a war crime and negligent homicide or worse, but the only people held accountable were the SEALs who brought him in, not the interrogator who shared the room with his corpse.
The CIA went rogue in Iraq. In the Jamadi case, a small group inside the Baghdad station created an illegal and unauthorized secret detention and torture program in Iraq, a Frankenstein version of the official one used against al Qaida. But this was the exception. The Mission makes clear that the buck stops at the Resolute Desk. The great intelligence fiascos of the 21st century—Iraq, WMDs, and torture—were all driven by the president.
The Mission is a book that might not get written today. Sixteen retired officers quoted in its pages lost their security clearances the day President Trump returned to office. Some asked to have their names and quotes removed after the election. Weiner suspects it may be a long time before we see another book like this.
Like its predecessor, The Mission passes an essential test for an intelligence history: Would someone who doesn’t know what a SCIF is (never mind having been inside one) want to keep reading? Tim Weiner shows that the history of a spy agency doesn’t have to read like a classified filing cabinet.
Correction: Tim Weiner won a Pulitzer at The Philadelphia Inquirer, not The New York Times.
THE MISSION | By Tim Weiner | HarperCollins | 464 pages | $35
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