Book Review / Revue de livres
Disclaimer: Articles are chosen for relevance and circulated for information only. Views expressed are those of the respective journalists / authors. Republication does not infer endorsement.
Book Review Editor: Ralph Mahar - Suggestions for Book Reviews will be gratefully received at thepillarsociety.bulletins@gmail.com
Avertissement : Les articles sont choisis pour leur pertinence et sont diffusés à titre d'information seulement. Les opinions exprimées sont celles des journalistes/auteurs respectifs. La republication n'implique pas d'approbation.
Rédacteur en chef des critiques de livres : Ralph Mahar - Les suggestions de critiques de livres sont les bienvenues à l'adresse suivante : thepillarsociety.bulletins@gmail.com |
|
|
 |
| John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, during his swearing-in ceremony last month. Mr. Ratcliffe has begun an effort to push long-tenured agency officers to retire early.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times |
|
Book Review:
The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century
by Tim Weiner
July 15, 2025
Publisher: Mariner Books
|
|
|
 |
The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century
by Tim Weiner
A masterpiece of reporting based on-the-record interviews with six former CIA directors and scores of spies, station chiefs, and top operations officers: The Mission is a gripping and revelatory history of the modern CIA, reaching from 9/11 through its covert operations in Afghanistan and Iraq to today’s secret battles with Russia and China, concluding with the Agency's own fight for survival under the current president of the United States
Tim Weiner's epic successor to Legacy of Ashes, his National Book Award–winning classic about the CIA's first sixty years
At the turn of the century, the Central Intelligence Agency was in crisis. The end of the Cold War had robbed the agency of its mission. More than thirty overseas stations and bases had been shuttered, and scores that remained had been severely cut back. Many countries where surveillance was once deemed crucial went uncovered. Essential intelligence wasn’t being collected. At the dawn of the information age, the CIA’s officers and analysts worked with outmoded technology, struggling to distinguish the clear signals of significant facts from the cacophony of background noise.
Then came September 11th, 2001. After the attacks, the CIA transformed itself into a lethal paramilitary force, running secret prisons and brutal interrogations, mounting deadly drone attacks, and all but abandoning its core missions of espionage and counterespionage. The consequences were grave: the deaths of scores of its recruited foreign agents, the theft of its personnel files by Chinese spies, the penetration of its computer networks by Russian intelligence and American hackers, and the tragedies of Afghanistan and Iraq. A new generation of spies now must fight the hardest targets—Moscow, Beijing, Tehran—while confronting a president who has attacked the CIA as a subversive force.
From Pulitzer Prize winner Tim Weiner, The Mission tells the gripping, high-stakes story of the CIA through the first quarter of the twenty-first century, revealing how the agency fought to rebuild the espionage powers it lost during the war on terror—and finally succeeded in penetrating the Kremlin. The struggle has life-and-death consequences for America and its allies. The CIA must reclaim its original mission: know thy enemies. The fate of the free world hangs in the balance.
A masterpiece of reporting, The Mission includes exclusive on-the-record interviews with six former CIA directors, the top spymaster, thirteen station chiefs, and scores of top operations officers who served undercover for decades and have never spoken to a journalist before.
Indigo / Amazon |
|
|
Reviews:
A singular triumph—an intimate chronicle of the CIA, its crises, and its opportunities since 9/11.― Kirkus Reviews
As Tim Weiner demonstrates in “The Mission,” his latest account of misadventure at the C.I.A., this trend is likely only to accelerate with Trump in the White House. Both as a onetime reporter for The New York Times and as a book author, Weiner has made tracking the fluctuating fortunes of the American intelligence community his life’s work. His masterly “Legacy of Ashes,” detailing the C.I.A.’s first half-century, won a National Book Award in 2007. “The Mission” picks up where that book left off, narrating the agency’s history well beyond the fall of communism. It is exhaustive and prodigiously researched, but also curiously ungainly.―Scott Anderson - The New York Times
This is a journalist’s book, and bears the marks of it. But no one has opened up the CIA to us like Weiner has, and The Mission deserves to win Weiner a second Pulitzer. Given the intense unpopularity of Trump in the upper echelons of American journalism, he may well get it. - John Simpson - The Guardian |
|
See also:
The Mission as reviewed by John Simpson for The Guardian - July 10, 2025
The Mission - as reviewed by Kirkus Review - June 1, 2025
The Mission as reviewed by Scott Anderson for New York Times - July 15, 2025 |
|
|
About the book:
The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century
by Tim Weiner
Mariner Books - 461 pages 21.99 (Kindle)
Publication Date: July 15, 2025
|
|
 |
|
About the Author: Tim Weiner
Tim Weiner graduated from Columbia University with a Bachelor of Arts in history and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He was a Washington correspondent for The Philadelphia Inquirer from 1982 to 1992, for The New York Times from 1993 to 2009 as a foreign correspondent in Mexico, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Sudan and as a national security correspondent in Washington, DC.
Weiner won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting as an investigative reporter at The Philadelphia Inquirer, for his articles on the black budget spending at the Pentagon and the CIA. His book Blank Check: The Pentagon's Black Budget is based on that newspaper series.
He won the National Book Award in Nonfiction for his 2007 book Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA.
In 2012, Weiner published Enemies: A History of the FBI, which traces the history of the FBI's secret intelligence operations from the bureau's creation in the early 20th century through its ongoing role in the war on terrorism.
His latest book, The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare, 1945–2020, was published in 2020. Among other things it describes how the CIA helped Joseph Mobutu as a reliable anti-communist in Congo, or how Ronald Reagan's encounter with Pope John Paul II led to a covert program to support the Polish Solidarity movement. Timothy Naftali cautions that Weiner may be overstating Putin's influence on the 2016 Presidential elections: "The Trump phenomenon, which the Russians abetted but did not create, emerged from a broken nation." This is also the assessment of Rajan Menon who, in his review for The New York Times, furthermore contends that he found no evidence supporting Weiner's suggestion that NATO expansion toward the Russian border in the 1990s sprang from the mind of Anthony Lake.
He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Kate Doyle, an expert in human rights and freedom of information.
Biography Credit: Wikipedia
|
|
 |
| Tim Weiner, author of "The Mission," talks to Christiane Amanpour about his investigation into the missteps at the CIA. - July 2025 |
|
À propos du livre :
La mission : la CIA au XXIe siècle
par Tim Weiner
Mariner Books - 461 pages 21,99 $ (Kindle)
Date de publication : 15 juillet 2025 |
|
|
