"The mission of the US Central Intelligence Agency is extremely hazardous," writes Tim Weiner in his July 2025 book, The Mission: the CIA in the 21st century.
Tim Weiner's portrait of an agency under strain
Weiner — a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner who conducted more than 100 on‑the‑record interviews with CIA directors and officers — frames the CIA’s work as perilous and legally fraught. His July 2025 survey traces a pattern of operational risk, contested analysis and recurring pressure on the agency to bend intelligence to political ends. He situates those themes across the post‑Cold War era into the present and revisits ground he covered in an earlier history, Legacy of Ashes.
From the Soviet collapse to counter‑terrorism: a lost mission and a new task
According to Weiner, the end of the Cold War left the CIA without its defining raison d’être: protecting the United States and the West against communist adversaries. The agency “lost prominence through the 1990s,” he writes, and counter‑terrorism later replaced the war on communism as the CIA’s central mission.
That transition, Weiner reports, carried early warning failures. In the lead‑up to the September 11, 2001 attacks the CIA attempted to convince President George W Bush that al‑Qaeda was preparing “terrible acts” against the United States, but the agency could not pinpoint the time or nature of such attacks. Weiner notes that al‑Qaeda had bombed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and had declared war on the United States.
The 2002 Iraq estimate: missing spies and overstated danger
Weiner recounts the summer of 2002, when the Senate Intelligence Committee requested a national intelligence estimate on Saddam Hussein’s arsenal. At that moment, the CIA had no up‑to‑date human intelligence presence in Iraq — it “had not had a spy in Iraq since 1998.”
Despite that gap, the agency compiled an estimate asserting that Saddam had nuclear, biological and chemical capabilities far beyond the reality. The agency then communicated that assessment publicly and portrayed Iraq as a severe danger. Weiner argues the CIA was influenced by Saddam’s own desire for others — including the Iranians and the CIA — to believe he possessed such weapons as a deterrent. That “cloud of poor reporting” hung over the agency for years thereafter, in Weiner’s account.
Paramilitary roles, secret prisons and the diversion from espionage
After 9/11, Washington called on the CIA to act as “the tip of the spear” in the war on terror, and the agency assumed an expanded lethal paramilitary role. Weiner reports the CIA erected secret prisons and “inflicted torture during interrogations,” activities for which the agency was not structured. He argues this diversion from classic human intelligence collection — recruiting foreign insiders to reveal decision‑making inside adversary governments — further tarnished the CIA’s reputation and disrupted its core tradecraft.
China, Russia and alliances: operational highs, strategic lows
Weiner describes sharp contrasts in clandestine results and setbacks. In China, the CIA reportedly recruited a network of upwardly mobile officials by financing the fees needed for promotions; under Xi Jinping those spies were uncovered and killed, a grave operational loss. By contrast, following Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the CIA’s clandestine services are said to have used counter‑terrorism skills to recruit inside the Kremlin — spies, diplomats and oligarchs — and to steal and reveal what Weiner characterises as Putin’s war plans for Ukraine. The public revelation of those plans, initially met with scepticism, helped galvanise NATO countries, according to the book.
Crucially, Weiner emphasises that such global CIA operations depend on broad cooperation with foreign intelligence services. He warns that this cooperation is threatened by a deterioration in U.S. relations with traditional allies and partners; working‑level cooperation may be continuing for now, but is at risk.
What this means for policymakers, allied services, and CIA officers
- Policymakers and regulators: Weiner argues that ignoring or weakening the CIA’s intelligence — and reducing its capabilities — poses a direct national‑security risk. The government’s treatment of analytic products and the agency’s resourcing choices will determine whether that risk materialises.
- Allied intelligence services and NATO countries: Cooperative collection and clandestine access are presented as essential to major successes, such as the disclosure of Russian plans. A deterioration in diplomatic relations, Weiner warns, threatens the continuity of that cooperation.
- CIA officers and recruits: Personnel decisions have operational consequences. Weiner reports dismissals of senior analysts and recent hires, and the abolition of a diversity policy that he says undermines one of the agency’s strengths — officers with cultural and language skills needed to recruit and run foreign sources.
Weiner closes with a stark conclusion: by not listening to the CIA and by weakening its capabilities, the U.S. government risks “severely and unnecessarily weakening national security.” Whether the agency can rebuild trust, preserve human‑intelligence tradecraft and sustain allied partnerships is the practical question his account leaves on the table.
Source: https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/bookshelf-the-cia-in-the-21st-century/
