IN 1976 When we were both based in Brussels, my BBC mentor, the great Charles Wheeler, returned to the office of a big party at the United States Embassy one evening and pointed out: “The most intelligent and entertaining people of these things are always the CIA. An exaggeration, of course, but with a degree of truth. Why an organization with huge sums of money at its disposal, a recruitment record for the brightest and the best, and the widest of the discounts, failed to collect a better record? It is true that we may not know much CIA’s success. But we know a lot of his failures, and some of them have marked the history of the United States inevitably.
Mission,, Tim Weiner, whose reports on the CIA in the New York Times have always been an essential reading, and whose following books on the US intelligence community have a place in the shelves of anyone interested in international affairs, provides a variety of answers to this essential question. As he showed almost 20 years ago in Legacy of Ashes, his CIA history of its foundation in 1947 at the end of the 20th century, the agency’s position in the late 90s was quite desperate. He was hungry for money and bleeding talent. A station manager in Bucharest was revealed that he was working for the Russians, handing them over the names of a large number of agents and employees. But the new American administration which arrived at the beginning of 2001 was not too worried. In March of the same year, Donald Rumsfeld, the defense secretary, told the chiefs of joint staff: “For the first time in decades, the country has made no strategic challenge.” Six months later, September 11 came. The CIA had attempted to convince the George W Bush without a fictitus about the imminent threat of Islamic ultra-foundicalism, but no one in the administration listened. The agency was considered broken.
The people of British intelligence are often sarcastic about the CIA, as bad relationships tend to be. However, some of the private criticisms made by SIS – better known as MI6 – are well observed. (The sources of Weiner inside and around the CIA are impressive and absolutely impeccable, but it seems to have no great interest in other Western intelligence agencies; apart from a few references dispersed to SIS and GCHQ in the mission, only Dutch intelligence receives a great mention.) Afghanistan, the persuadant of sumpturains of the anti-War The ISI supported its own political ends. The CIA’s eyes were ultimately only opened when, by a good work of old -fashioned detective, his agents discovered that Osama bin Laden lived alongside the best Pakistani military brass in Abbottabad.
But there is a more fundamental criticism that SIS and other intelligence aficionados at the CIA level: that it has never been authorized not to be an intelligence collection agency. Truman’s American presidents also wanted it to be a secret army, a point that Weiner does again and again.
Long before the shameful affair of Iran-Contra in the 1980s, when Reagan officials sold weapons to Iran, then financed the CIA illegal guerrilla warfare in Nicaragua with the profits, the presidents used the agency for their shaded regimes despite everything ethical scruples its agents, and sometimes its highest range officers could have had. The CIA accepted Bush’s edict, based on the very questionable advice he received from the relatively junior lawyer for the White House, John Yoo, that water, long sleep deprivation and prisoners suspended by their arms for hours did not constitute torture. Perhaps, as a government agency, she had no real alternative, but her employees certainly obeyed, sometimes with enthusiasm and even sadistically. Weiner is clear in his condemnation of this, but inclined to give the CIA the benefit of the doubt: “The CIA, to rare exceptions, was not a thug elephant. When people were trampled on, it was not the fault of the elephant. It was the fault of the mahout – the elephant driver. And the Mahout was the President of the United States. “
Well, maybe. But it is difficult to find excuses for Gina Haspel, for example, who attended and supervised one of the prisons of the agency’s black site before becoming the first CIA director.
Weiner sources,, who are excellent, seem to have not included Haspel herself. But they encompass several CIA personalities of the period under discussion. These people have opened up to him and, therefore, the book contains many new essential details. Weiner’s story about Donald Trump’s ties with Vladimir Putin in 2016 is clearly based on the agency’s interior information, and that leads him to openly affirm that Trump was Putin Polezny silly – His useful idiot. There are all kinds of other important and fascinating revelations of the mission, but it is the book of a journalist at the top of his game, not a academic. Party is written with hot anger at the idea of what Trump does in the United States and the CIA in particular. Weiner clearly channels the opinion of the CIA when he writes in a hidden way on the ridiculous John L Ratcliffe, who received the post of director by Trump. Ratcliffe complined without hesitation in Trump’s extraordinary request that the CIA sends the White House the first names and the initials of each recent CIA recruit by unsecured e-mail.
There is no doubt that Trump damaged the CIA, but he may not have helped Putin that it seemed likely when Weiner wrote his book. Whatever the Russian president, thought that he could get Trump from a second term, he has actually been very seriously damaged so far. He lost his puppet and his bases in Syria, partly through the efforts of the CIA, and his ally Iran, after a shocking attack from Israel, now looks like a paper tiger. Ukraine – and Weiner is particularly good in the involvement of the CIA to try to stop the invasion in 2022 – did not, like many people, expected it, folded in the face of Putin’s assault, and it became more difficult for Trump to simply brush this war aside. That Putin actually won Trump’s presidency in 2016 (Weiner cites cybercriminals of the Russian government which, according to him, have swung the election as shouting “We have made America again!”) He no longer pulls the strings with such an effect.
As I say, this is a journalist’s book, and bears the brands. But no one opened the CIA to us as Weiner, and the mission deserves to win a second pulitzer in Weiner. Given Trump’s intense unpopularity in the upper levels of American journalism, he may well obtain it.
