The meeting place of facts, ego, ignorance and politics typically is a messy arena as Tim Weiner illustrates over and over in this powerful account of the Central Intelligence Agency actions since the 9/11 attacks.
The title, “The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century,” would seem to suggest a tidy, academic-style analysis. Instead, it’s a riveting account of a vital institution that descended into turmoil with agents after 9/11 sometimes creating diabolical tortures and units operating seemingly on their own. The author details an agency that buckled under pressure from the younger President Bush to find evidence that Saddam Hussein had developed chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.
Compelling evidence was not to be found but Bush pressed on anyway with a military campaign to topple Hussein, killing 4,492 American service members in the process.
Weiner leaves no doubt as to who is responsible in every misdeed and operational failure he describes — everyone in this 392-page narrative is identified by name. How Weiner persuaded so many people to talk on the record is a journalistic feat that should make this book impossible to dismiss.
If “The Mission” has a fault, it’s that it is light on prescription — how do we insure that the CIA remains faithful — without political meddling — to its mission gathering the intelligence needed to keep America safe ?
The CIA must reclaim its original mission, Weiner writes: “Know thy enemies.”
To do that work, the CIA has since its inception attracted some of America’s brightest and most dedicated, willing to risk their lives to get the information the nation’s top political and military leaders need. Consider counterterrorism expert Michael D’Andrea, for example. Weiner writes that D’Andrea worked 100 hours per week, obsessively pursuing al-Qaeda. How he managed that pace as a chain smoker is unexplored. Perhaps his vegetarian diet helped.
Half of the book details how the CIA swerved far out of its intelligence-gathering lane after the 9/11 attacks and morphed into a paramilitary organization, calling its torture tactics “enhanced interrogation techniques” and killing many thought to be terrorists absent the oversight that governs the military services.
For example, one agent let a prisoner freeze to death in a dungeon-like “fetid hellhole” at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.
In the agent’s defense, the post 9/11 months and years were a time of pervasive fear of another attack and relentless pressure on the CIA to prevent that. Some notable successes followed; agents penetrated both the Kremlin and Saddam Hussein’s government.
Knowledge is the essential tool of national security and peace and “The Mission” makes it clear we let the CIA go off track at our peril.
“A new cold war is slowly escalating toward existential danger,” the author writes. “Only good intelligence can prevent a surprise attack, a fatal miscalculation, a futile war.”
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