In a world increasingly controlled by the secret services, this recent history of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is probably a better indicator of future events than the words of politicians. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tim Weiner illuminates the moral and legal grey zone of the United States’s most famous clandestine organisation through his lifelong specialism in intelligence.
The effectiveness of the CIA has yo-yoed over the last 25 years, falling under George Bush jnr and 9/11, and peaking under former president Barack Obama, whose decisiveness and perception surprised the 22,000 staff.
Unfortunately, the hallmarks that made George W’s eight years so fraught – the policy vacuum, blame culture and estrangement from reality – are all present again, as described in the prologue, Autocracy in America, written two months into the start of the current presidency.
Newly appointed CIA director John Ratcliffe, from Texas, has “promised to align the CIA with Trump’s view of the world”. Loyalty tests (“Wasn’t the 2020 election stolen?”, for instance) filter candidates for top appointments; and the new posse seems willing to effectuate Donald J’s dreams for Greenland, Canada and elsewhere.
As well as charting the 80-year old agency’s highs (under “beloved” Bush snr) and lows (with Richard Nixon, seeking rescue from Watergate), The Mission traces the expansion from the core work of espionage to political warfare, paramilitarism, training other agencies (Jordan and Iraq), and, most controversially, into running “black sites” such as Guantánamo, “enhanced interrogation techniques” (torture) and assassination without the justification of self-defence. In 2022, former presidentJoe Biden even outsourced negotiations with Russia “to prevent a nuclear war” to his CIA director Bill Burns.
A fascinating account informed by scores of interviews, The Mission traces the CIA’s loss of direction after the cold war. “How could it be great without its great enemy?”
Espiocrats and the bizarre – the “rampant” sex in desperate situations such as the Baghdad outstation – pervade the tale. Weiner and his wife, Kate Doyle (descended from Robert Emmett’s brother Thomas) were in Galway in June, and although the country is not mentioned, Irish intelligence chiefs will, no doubt, read The Mission to help frame reactions if, as Weiner hypothesises, Trump makes the CIA go rogue again and carry out plans to “rebuild the secret prisons, overthrow a sovereign nation, or assassinate his political enemies”.
- Neasa MacErlean is the author of Telling the Truth is Dangerous: A history of Robert Dudley Edwards
