What Will Become of the C.I.A.?
In December, 1988, as the Soviet Union was beginning to come apart, Senator Bill Bradley, a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, convened a closed-door hearing with several of the C.I.A.’s top Soviet experts. These were analysts, not operatives. They did not run spies or weapons, or shoot poisoned darts at people; mostly, they sat at their desks at Langley, reading Pravda or studying photographs of Soviet military parades. The hearing found them in a melancholy mood, pondering life without the U.S.S.R. “The Soviet Union is so fundamental to our outlook on the world, to our concept of what is right and wrong in politics,” Douglas J. MacEachin, who ran the C.I.A.’s office of Soviet analysis, said, “that major change in the U.S.S.R. is as significant as some major change in the sociological fabric of the United States itself.” And so, MacEachin explained, a C.I.A. analyst struggled to see things clearly; not only his world view but his livelihood was at stake. If the Soviet Union disappeared, what would become of those who made their careers analyzing it? “There are not many homes for old wizards of Armageddon,” MacEachin said.
Soon enough, the Soviet Union collapsed with a whimper, and the United States stood alone. Perceiving no enemies on the near horizon, the nation stopped looking for them so fervently. Budgets were cut, retirements suggested. Agents in the field were brought in from the cold. Bill Clinton, the first post-Cold War President, was elected to fix the economy. So infrequent were Clinton’s meetings with his first C.I.A. director, James Woolsey, that when a small plane crashed onto the White House lawn, in the fall of 1994, people joked that it must be Woolsey, trying to get an audience with the President.
History was over. Humanity had resolved most major questions. The great rivalries of the age were between Biggie and Tupac, “Friends” and “Seinfeld.” When, in the late nineteen-nineties, Al Qaeda began mounting ever more sophisticated terror attacks—bombing two American embassies in East Africa, in 1998, and then blowing a giant hole in the hull of a Navy ship, the U.S.S. Cole, in 2000—it took some time to adjust. George W. Bush, in the first six and a half months of his Presidency, received thirty-six C.I.A. briefings on Al Qaeda. This was a lot of briefings—perhaps too many. If Al Qaeda was always about to launch an attack on American soil, would it ever actually attack? Then, on a cloudless morning in September, hijackers seized four planes on the Eastern Seaboard and flew two of them into the World Trade Center. History was back, and so was the C.I.A.
The journalist Tim Weiner begins his new book, “The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century” (Mariner), amid the steady but fruitless drumbeat of intelligence about Al Qaeda, and then, following the attacks, the overwhelming response. Two days after the Twin Towers fell, the C.I.A. counterterrorism chief, Cofer Black—a large, charismatic former covert operative known for his imposing presence and already several years into the hunt for Osama bin Laden—gave a thrilling presentation to Bush and his national-security team. He promised to defeat Al Qaeda within weeks. “Bin Laden, dead,” he said. “Zawahiri, dead.” He added, “When we’re through with them, they’ll have flies walking across their eyeballs.”
Bush ate it up. Speaking to reporters at the Pentagon a few days later, he leaned in to his Texas drawl and said that bin Laden was wanted “dead or alive.” The C.I.A. analyst Michael Morell, who served as the President’s daily briefer and would later become the acting director of the agency, was less enthusiastic. “He cannot deliver on that promise,” Morell recalled thinking about Black. “We don’t have that kind of intelligence. We don’t have the capability to do that.” It was the ancient yin and yang of the C.I.A. Operatives were adventuresome; analysts were cautious. Presidents, unsurprisingly, preferred the adventuresome. And so the C.I.A. went to war in Afghanistan.
Weiner is a longtime national-security correspondent with a specialty in intelligence. His first book on the subject was about Aldrich Ames, the Soviet mole inside the C.I.A., who, before finally being ferreted out by the F.B.I., in 1994, handed over the identities of dozens of agency assets. When the K.G.B. learned from him the names of Soviet citizens spying for the U.S., it shot them. Weiner visited him in jail shortly after his arrest, and Ames maintained that he had done what he did not for money but for peace.
Weiner’s best-known book, “Legacy of Ashes” (2007), is a history of the C.I.A.’s first sixty years—a chronicle of analytical failures and harebrained operations that made the agency seem less diabolical than daffy. He found not only a divide between the Directorate of Analysis and the clandestine Directorate of Operations, but a further divide within the clandestine service itself. Was the mission to use tradecraft to gather intelligence, or to use money, propaganda, and violence to shape events? Was the point to know the world or to change it? Increasingly, as the decades passed, the answer tilted toward the latter. In the name of fighting communism, the C.I.A. put its thumb on the scale of the 1948 elections in Italy, overthrew elected leaders in Iran and Guatemala, and generally ran roughshod through the Global South. The 1953 coup in Iran—which toppled Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and handed ruling power to what had previously been a constitutional monarchy—was, in Weiner’s account, a Pyrrhic victory: it gave the agency and its masters the dangerous impression that this was something they could pull off at will.
Covert action became a regular Presidential recourse. One could see the appeal. It was far less noisy than sending B-2 bombers or your Secretary of State. If it went well, great; if it failed, you could often pretend that it had never happened. And failure was frequent. Throughout the early Cold War, the C.I.A. parachuted émigrés into Albania, China, North Korea, and Soviet Ukraine, hoping to gather information and maybe even spark some sort of resistance; the operatives were usually captured and never heard from again. But the C.I.A. kept trying. J.F.K., only recently sworn in, acceded to a half-baked C.I.A. scheme left over from the Eisenhower Administration: several battalions of Cuban exiles would land at a Cuban inlet known as the Bay of Pigs and topple Fidel Castro. This turned out to be easier said than done. The fiasco was immediate and public, but, even after the rout, Kennedy kept pressing the agency to assassinate Castro. L.B.J., inheriting Kennedy’s Vietnam mess, found himself in a bind of his own. As Weiner recounts, Johnson was convinced that Saigon would fall without American support, but he didn’t want to commit huge numbers of troops. At the same time, it was politically unthinkable to be seen to have pulled out. Covert action was, in Weiner’s words, “the only path between war and diplomacy,” and so the agency became drawn ever deeper into the mire.
An organization devoted to secrecy ends up with a lot of secrets. The C.I.A. did its best to keep its own hidden—from the Warren Commission, from people in other parts of the agency, and, of course, from Congress. The C.I.A. operated like a besieged, landlocked country, surrounded by rivals and foes. Its goal was to fight communism, but you couldn’t do that if Congress cut your funding or the Pentagon gobbled you up. The audience that mattered most was the President. In 1975, at a rare moment of introspection in American politics, Senator Frank Church wondered whether the C.I.A. had become a “rogue elephant on a rampage.” The answer, actually, was no. Almost always, the orders came from the top. Presidents didn’t like to hear bad news, and smart C.I.A. directors learned to withhold it. Richard Nixon, despite his contempt for the C.I.A. (“They’ve got forty thousand people over there reading newspapers”), ordered it to come up with a psychological profile of Daniel Ellsberg and to try to prevent Salvador Allende from getting elected. Ronald Reagan charged it with arming the Contras. Even the sweet, saintly Jimmy Carter, who cancelled a number of the agency’s more odious operations, signed a covert-action order to send weapons to resistance groups after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The arms were routed through Pakistani intelligence, which favored the most committed and fanatical Afghan fighters. When the Soviets left, the holy warriors, and the weaponry, remained.
The story of the C.I.A. that Weiner tells in “The Mission” closely resembles the one he told in “Legacy of Ashes.” At the start of the war on terror, as at the start of the Cold War, intelligence was at a premium. “Our knowledge of what the other side was up to, their intentions, their capabilities, was nil, or next to it,” one of the C.I.A.’s early directors told Weiner about the Soviets. The situation with Al Qaeda was similar. Weiner quotes Bob Gates, a Soviet analyst who became the agency’s director and later Secretary of Defense: “We didn’t know jack shit about al Qaeda. That’s the reason a lot of this stuff happened, the interrogations and everything else, because we didn’t know anything. If we’d had a great database and knew exactly what al Qaeda was all about, what their capabilities were and stuff like that, some of these measures wouldn’t have been necessary.”
Like the Cold War, the war on terror kept expanding. By the time it was over, the U.S. had conducted antiterrorism trainings in as many as a hundred and fifty countries, deployed combat troops in at least fifteen, and launched drone strikes in at least seven. The most fateful expansion was into Iraq. In the lead-up to that invasion, under intense pressure, the C.I.A. told the White House what it wanted to hear: that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. (It didn’t.) The episode, to which Weiner devotes considerable space, remains a black mark on the agency, but it’s not as if Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were holding their breath in anticipation of a Colin Powell speech to the United Nations. As one former operative tells Weiner, “These guys would have gone to war if Saddam had a rubber band and a paper clip that could put your eye out.”
From the first, the fixation on Iraq interfered with the mission to destroy Al Qaeda. Reporting for the Times in Afghanistan in late 2001, Weiner heard from a local official that bin Laden was hiding in Tora Bora—travelling on horseback by night, sleeping in caves. The same official had, it turned out, told the same thing to the C.I.A., which had relayed it to General Tommy Franks, the top U.S. commander. But Franks, who later said that he was getting multiple intelligence reports of bin Laden in multiple places, didn’t act on the information. “Bin Laden was definitely there,” Weiner writes, and we missed him. “In the general’s defense,” he goes on, “he was distracted.” Rumsfeld had just ordered Franks—less than three months after September 11th—to create a plan for the invasion of Iraq. Bin Laden disappeared into Pakistan. It would take the C.I.A. a decade before it got another solid lead as to his whereabouts.
The overwhelming need to know the enemy, lest he attack without warning, eventually led, during both the Cold War and the war on terror, to the same place: torture. It was the dark, or darker, side of running human assets. In March, 2002, the agency got hold of an Al Qaeda associate known as Abu Zubaydah and flew him to a secret prison in Thailand. There, an F.B.I. agent named Ali Soufan, a fluent Arabic speaker, won his trust and learned a great deal. Zubaydah revealed that the 9/11 attacks had been orchestrated by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, described Al Qaeda’s money-smuggling operations, and even mentioned outlandish future plots—like a plan to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge, inspired by a group viewing of the 1998 “Godzilla.”
Then the C.I.A. began interrogating Zubaydah. Agents “stripped him naked, chained him hand and foot to the floor, and blasted death metal music in his ears,” Weiner writes. They kept him awake for seventy-six hours, until medics intervened. They built a coffin around him. None of it worked. Soufan phoned F.B.I. headquarters and threatened to arrest the psychologist the C.I.A. had hired to run its “enhanced interrogation”; instead, Soufan was pulled out and recalled to the U.S. The interrogation continued. After receiving Presidential approval, the interrogators waterboarded Zubaydah for four days. They poured water down his throat and up his nose until he thought he would drown. “I have nothing more,” he pleaded. “I give you everything.” He nearly died. Finally, to make it stop, he started inventing things. The interrogators relented. All this was videotaped. Three years later, fearing that the tapes would leak, the head of the counterterrorism division at the time of the torture, Jose A. Rodriguez, and his deputy, Gina Haspel, ordered that the tapes be destroyed.
