The Mission

Tim Weiner, who first visited CIA headquarters in 1988 as a young reporter returning from covering the agency's arms shipments to Afghan guerrillas, presents The Mission as the first chronicle of the twenty-first-century CIA, constructed from on-the-record interviews with more than 100 officers and extensive documentary research.

The narrative begins with CIA Director George Tenet's escalating warnings about al Qaeda in the spring and summer of 2001. Tenet had inherited an agency devastated by the end of the cold war: Its budget had been slashed, nearly 5,000 experienced personnel had departed, and the clandestine service, the CIA's espionage arm, numbered barely 1,000 officers. Counterterrorism chief Cofer Black pushed for armed operations against Osama bin Laden, but National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice refused to consider the covert-action finding, a presidential order authorizing secret operations, that Tenet drafted to capture or kill bin Laden. The National Security Council did not meet on al Qaeda until September 4, when nothing was resolved.

The September 11 attacks transformed the CIA into a clandestine army. Bush signed the most aggressive covert-action finding in the agency's history on September 17, granting powers to destroy al Qaeda under the code word GREYSTONE and doubling the CIA's budget. Teams entered Afghanistan within weeks, allied with the Northern Alliance, an anti-Taliban militia coalition, and guided air strikes that toppled the Taliban. Paramilitary officer Greg Vogle protected Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun political leader the CIA backed, as Karzai was proclaimed Afghanistan's new leader at the Bonn Conference. Bin Laden escaped from Tora Bora in December 2001 because Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and General Tommy Franks failed to order a military dragnet, a failure Weiner attributes to their preoccupation with Iraq.

That preoccupation had been building before 9/11. Luis Rueda, appointed chief of the Iraq Operations Group in August 2001, drafted a covert-action plan code-named ANABASIS for espionage, sabotage, and direct action inside Iraq; Bush signed it in February 2002. Flawed intelligence then drove the country to war. The CIA produced a National Intelligence Estimate, the intelligence community's formal coordinated assessment, on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction in just three weeks, stating with "high confidence" that Saddam Hussein possessed chemical and biological weapons. The analysts relied on unvetted sources, including an Iraqi émigré code-named Curveball whose claims were never verified. Secretary of State Colin Powell delivered the false case to the United Nations on February 5, 2003, with Tenet sitting behind him.

Weiner documents a parallel triumph. Over nine years, CIA officers infiltrated the nuclear black market of Pakistani proliferator A. Q. Khan and intercepted a shipment of centrifuge components bound for Libya. Negotiators convinced Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi to surrender his nuclear program, chemical weapons, and missiles, proving that intelligence alone could disarm a dictator.

The Iraq invasion generated cascading failures. American viceroy Paul Bremer dissolved the Iraqi military and purged Saddam's ruling Ba'ath Party over the CIA's warnings, igniting an insurgency. Meanwhile, the CIA created secret prisons, known as black sites, where prisoners were waterboarded and subjected to other extreme techniques. Jose Rodriguez, who had overseen a lethal CIA drug interdiction program in Peru that killed American missionaries, was elevated to head of the clandestine service and pushed the interrogation program forward. When Porter Goss succeeded Tenet as director in 2004, his staff purged senior officers, driving out the agency's most experienced leaders.

General Michael Hayden stabilized the agency after replacing Goss in 2006. Working with Baghdad station chief Paul Nevin and General David Petraeus, the CIA fused intelligence with military operations and supported the Anbar Awakening, a Sunni tribal rebellion against al Qaeda, temporarily reducing violence. Hayden also escalated drone strikes in Pakistan's tribal lands, a campaign President Barack Obama dramatically expanded. Under CIA Director Leon Panetta, Obama authorized 540 drone strikes over eight years, killing nearly 3,800 people including hundreds of civilians, while closing the black sites. In December 2009, the CIA suffered its deadliest day since 1983 when a double agent detonated a suicide bomb at its base in Khost, Afghanistan, killing seven officers and a Jordanian intelligence ally. The hunt for bin Laden ended on May 1, 2011, when Navy SEALs raided a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where the CIA had traced a suspected courier.

Weiner chronicles catastrophic counterintelligence failures. Between 2010 and 2012, Chinese intelligence captured and executed close to 30 agents the CIA had recruited, a disaster traced to a traitorous officer, flawed covert communications systems, and possible Chinese-Iranian intelligence sharing. The Arab Spring further exposed the CIA's blind spots: The agency failed to foresee the uprisings sweeping the Middle East, and interventions in Libya and Syria produced chaos and new jihadist violence. CIA Director John Brennan, who took over in 2013, undertook the agency's biggest reorganization since 1947, creating new structures to shift focus from tactical counterterrorism toward long-term threats from Russia and China.

Russia's 2016 assault on American democracy vindicated that shift. Russian military intelligence hacked the Democratic National Committee and laundered stolen emails through WikiLeaks, while Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort shared internal polling data with a Russian intelligence operative. Brennan briefed Obama, warning that Vladimir Putin had personally authorized operations to elect Donald Trump, but Obama failed to alert the public.

Under Trump, the CIA faced what Weiner portrays as an unprecedented threat from a commander in chief who posed a direct danger to national security. Trump attacked the agency, attempted to install political loyalists, and was impeached for withholding military aid to Ukraine in exchange for political favors. A disgruntled officer named Josh Schulte stole 34 terabytes of CIA hacking tools, which WikiLeaks published in 2017, devastating the agency's cyber-espionage capabilities. Director Gina Haspel, the first woman to lead the CIA, repeatedly resisted Trump's attempts to ransack classified files and warned the chairman of the Joint Chiefs that "we are on the way to a right-wing coup" after Trump fired the defense secretary following his 2020 election loss.

The Doha agreement negotiated under Trump committed the United States to withdraw from Afghanistan and released 5,000 Taliban prisoners. When Kabul fell on August 15, 2021, CIA Director William Burns flew in to negotiate with Taliban leaders while CIA officers evacuated tens of thousands of partners. A suicide bomber from ISIS-K, the Islamic State's Afghan affiliate, killed 13 American service members and 170 Afghan civilians in the final days of the withdrawal.

Amid these setbacks, the CIA achieved what Weiner presents as its greatest intelligence triumph of the century. Clandestine service chief Tom Rakusan had rebuilt Russia House, the CIA unit focused on Russia, ordering the unprecedented sharing of classified files with allied intelligence services. By October 2021, converging streams of intelligence revealed that Putin intended to invade Ukraine. Burns flew to Moscow to warn Russian officials, then to Kyiv to brief President Volodymyr Zelensky. The CIA's selective declassification of intelligence exposed Putin's war plans, unified NATO, and enabled Ukraine to defend itself after the February 2022 invasion. Burns also conducted intelligence diplomacy that prevented nuclear escalation and, in August 2024, helped execute a historic multinational prisoner exchange freeing Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and others.

The book concludes with an epilogue describing the early weeks of Trump's second presidency as an assault on American intelligence. Trump installs political loyalists, sides openly with Russia, and cuts off intelligence support to Ukraine. Weiner warns that the CIA's experienced ranks are thinning, the foundations of American foreign policy are crumbling, and the risk of catastrophic intelligence failure is as high as it was at the start of the century.