Tim Weiner’s most recent book-length treatment of the history of the CIA, The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century, takes the post-9/11 period as its subject to tell the story of an agency at odds with itself and at odds with other parts of the United States government in the face of a widening, diversifying array of threats to US national security. As he winds down his tale, Weiner steps back. “The thought that humanity lay at the heart of espionage,” he writes, “clashed with the tenet that American intelligence was at best amoral and at worst immoral to the core.”
Across more than 400 pages, Weiner zooms in on the people whose job it is to get other people to betray their own countries or causes in the service of the safety of the US. This close-up view reveals the relationships between and among CIA officials, between CIA officials and foreign officials, and between CIA officials and other officials in government. These stories don’t cut in any single direction: sometimes the friction facilitates immorality and sometimes the friction forestalls it; sometimes the friction seems to make the US more safe and other times it seems that the friction increases danger.
Weiner covers the CIA from 9/11 through the Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, then into COVID-19 and up to today’s high-profile prisoner swaps. Over the course of the book, it becomes increasingly clear that Weiner’s narrative is about how the CIA undermines or upholds democratic norms in the US or abroad. This contrasts with other works, such as Chris Whipple’s The Spymasters . Whipple explores how much access CIA directors have to the president, their first customer, and how that access torques whether the CIA is providing advice to policy-makers or is itself trying — or succeeding — to make policy. For Whipple, the balancing act between proximity to the first customer without shading into policy making defines the role of the director.
Narrating the recent history of a highly secretive agency that has had some of its deeds and misdeeds chronicled in more or less real time is the essential task of The Mission. Weiner bookends his book by explaining his approach to that challenge:
“And ye shall know the truth, and the truth will make you free. … Was it possible to know the truth about the CIA? … The only way to begin was to talk to its veterans, to listen, and to try to learn how a secret intelligence service operates in an open democratic society. … Journalists and spies are not all that different. … Recruiting agents overseas was not unlike developing sources at the CIA, though reporters didn’t pay for information and spies did, handsomely. … The spy and the scribe both depend on establishing trust. They were driven by a thirst for a hidden truth. And they knew it could take years before the secrets they learned gave them a deep understanding of the way things really worked.”
The extended analogy here between espionage and journalism lights the path towards truth: the patience to cultivate relationships so that people share from their own perch the truth of how things really work. Weiner insists that: “Reporters, like spies, are only as good as their sources.” The plural of sources here is immensely important: it signals that the truth of how things really work is a matter spread between and among people within a secret intelligence service. Weiner doesn’t spell out in detail how he sifts and weighs and measures the veracity of his sources nor does he explicate his own process of explication: how he creates his own story of the way things really worked. Instead of telling us about this he elects to put them on full display.
The incidents at the heart of The Mission are today matters in the public record: from the failure to prevent 9/11 through the use of black sites for torture to the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. Each incident itself has received considerable treatment either in books devoted to the subject itself or as important parts of books on related subjects. Books provide the necessary distance facilitated by the passage of time to make sense of and meaning from events and how they are related to one another that the churn of the 24-hour news cycle doesn’t.
That secret activities come into the open, how they do, and when they do all matter enormously, especially for threads on which Weiner is pulling. The secrecy around the black sites, especially the destruction of tapes showing the torture of Abu Zubayda at a black site in Thailand, is especially instructive here.
It’s simultaneously a story about secret activities and a secret program being made public, what it means for a democratic society to work out its complicated relationship to its secret intelligence services; what it means for one of the services itself to work out that relationship when influential people within it are at odds with each other. And it’s about the long tail of secrecy, how the destruction of the tapes redounds to the more recent past during Gina Haspel’s tenure as director. Under Haspel, Weiner shows, the Agency refused to cough up its sources and methods even to its first customer. The through line here of a secretive organization that steals secrets itself jealously guarding its own secrets takes on various shades and hues when protecting that secrecy comes down to the ends: do they serve the value of openness in a democratic society, or do they contravene it?
Weiner both gives his sources their own voice and adds crucially important context. He may do this in a follow-up sentence after a direct quotation or in a footnote. But in whatever form, the effect is the same. The person has their own say, and the additional information amplifies or even undercuts the content of what they say. Weiner doesn’t weigh this down with big ideas about truth, its nature, meaning, contours, or the difficulty of obtaining or recognizing it. Instead, he simply allows the distance, discrepancy, and even divergence between statement and context to carry its own significance and significant weight.
In this way, the truth about the CIA in the 21st century emerges less as something concrete and ineluctable but as something that exists in the complicated interaction between individual people’s sense of the nature and meaning of events and a rendering of those events and their meanings fundamentally at odds with someone’s specific experience and understanding. “The way things really worked” is something that is both highly particular and individual, and a matter that cannot and should not reside with individuals, no matter how influential.
