The CIA Since the Turn of the Century

Tim Weiner, 69, is our best chronicler of the tangled history of the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1988 he won a Pulitzer at The Philadelphia Inquirer for a series of stories on black budget spending at the Pentagon and CIA. He spent 16 years at The New York Times as a foreign correspondent in Mexico, Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Sudan and broke a ton of stories as a national security correspondent in Washington. Tim won the National Book Award for Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA and followed it up with Enemies: A History of the FBI and The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare, 1945–2020. His 2025 book, The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century won great reviews. I spoke with him about it last month at the Open Book/Open Mind series at the Montclair (N.J.) Public Library, and some of his answers are chilling in light of what has happened since we talked, e.g., “Killing civilians does not endear you to the populace. It makes the war that you are prosecuting unwinnable. We saw that in Afghanistan, and we saw that in Iraq.” Afterwards, I followed up with a few questions about the Iran War. Excerpts:

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JONATHAN ALTER: This war was predicated on a lie, right?

TIM WEINER: The American attack was justified by lies. Iran doesn’t have the bomb and it wasn’t about to make or test one. As with Bush and Iraq, Trump invented a threat to start a war.

JONATHAN ALTER: You’ve written about the infamous role of the CIA’s Kim Roosevelt (Theodore’s grandson) in restoring the Shah to the throne in Iran in 1953. I was especially interested in that because I knew Kim Roosevelt slightly (his son, Mark Roosevelt, was a close friend in college). Roosevelt’s coup had a poisonous effect on Iranian-American relations for generations. How will this war play into that long and twisted history?

TIM WEINER: An Iranian drone hit part of the sprawling CIA station at the American embassy in Riyadh ten days ago. A payback, in a way, for the CIA coup that overthrew the duly elected leader of Iran and installed the despotic Shah in 1953. That’s the original sin of the story.

JONATHAN ALTER: Did the CIA blow it when it didn’t realize that part of an Iranian military base had been turned into a girls school?

TIM WEINER: The attack on the girl’s school wasn’t the CIA’s fault. [Responsibility apparently lies with the Defense Intelligence Agency, part of the Pentagon, which used outdated intel in its targeting].

JONATHAN ALTER: According to press accounts, the National Intelligence Council told Trump the regime change was “unlikely.” What’s the point of high quality intel if the president doesn’t listen to it?

TIM WEINER: It’s clear that intelligence reporting on the chances for dire outcomes is being disregarded.

JONATHAN ALTER: I’d like you to compare your two books about the CIA. Legacy of Ashes was about the CIA in the 20th century, from its founding in the late 1940s to its becoming notorious worldwide. Your new book, The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century, almost feels like a sequel. You argue the CIA was in some ways worse, or at least as bad, and in other ways better than it was in the 20th century. Does that summarize it?

TIM WEINER: The CIA was created in 1947 for two purposes, under a very short six-page charter. Primarily, President Truman wanted it to collect intelligence from around the world and give him a daily newspaper that was better than The New York Times. The second purpose was espionage, spying on other nations, to gather intelligence that would inform analysis, allow the president to conduct American foreign policy, and look for threats over the horizon.

All of that changed very quickly as the Cold War heated up. The Pentagon and the State Department demanded that the CIA conduct covert and paramilitary operations, not to know the world, which was its chartered purpose, but to change the world.

The fulcrum that transformed the CIA was September 11. The president ordered the CIA to become a paramilitary army and to do something it was never supposed to do and was never trained to do: take prisoners, imprison them, and torture them. That was the first transformation of the CIA in the 21st century.

This happened because, when we were attacked, we lacked intelligence. I’m going to quote Bob Gates, who was CIA director at the time, and later Secretary of Defense. Gates said that on September 12, 2001, we didn’t know jack shit about Al-Qaeda. If we had known who they were, how they moved people and money, and what their chain of command was, then none of this, by which he meant secret prisons and torture, would have been necessary. That transformation happened because of a lack of intelligence, and it drove the White House crazy.

“The president ordered the CIA to become a paramilitary army and to do something it was never supposed to do and was never trained to do: take prisoners, imprison them, and torture them.”

JONATHAN ALTER: Tim, before we get too far into George Tenet, why would he, or any CIA director, bring raw intelligence into the Oval Office instead of refining it, running it to ground, and establishing at least some plausibility for these reports?

TIM WEINER: I was in Washington, D.C. for about six weeks after 9-11 and then shipped out to Afghanistan. Every time your cell phone rang, it felt like a harbinger of disaster. Fear gripped Washington in those days, weeks, and months. It flowed into a toxic cocktail of fear, secrecy, and ignorance. Who are these guys? We didn’t know. Not really.

I knew George Tenet pretty well. We had done many interviews together when he was on the National Security Council, and later when he was deputy director and then director of the CIA. George running the CIA would be like making me the head of General Motors. He had been promoted far above his pay grade after the agency went through five directors in six years during the tumult of the 1990s.

To underscore the point, the CIA’s analysts knew that George had gone to every friendly and unfriendly intelligence service in the world and said, send us threat information. Some of those services had bad actors who were happy to scream fire in a crowded theater just to mess with the United States. Tenet felt he could not miss anything. It was a terrible idea, and his top analysts said so.

They knew that somewhere between 50 and 99 percent of what came in was bullshit. They knew it, but they could not say so. It went unfiltered into the Oval Office. That was George’s imperative. It was cover-your-ass bureaucratic thinking driven by fear. Fear of the unknown. And it is the job of the CIA to know the unknown.

Former CIA Director George Tenet (Washington Post)

JONATHAN ALTER: But we know from what happened with Iraq that one of the most disturbing things, in hindsight, is how quickly that war entered the picture. Literally on 9-11, Bush and his people were already talking about going to war with Iraq. This wasn’t a decision made a year later. It was that afternoon. So why? Was it about revenge for what Saddam did to George H.W. Bush?

TIM WEINER: Correct. In 1993, Bush the elder went to Kuwait to celebrate the success of the first Gulf War, and Saddam and his brutal but feckless intelligence service had a plot to kill him. Psychoanalyzing the son is a fool’s errand; he had a simple attitude: you tried to kill my daddy, I’m going to kill you.

There was another belief at work among W’s coterie, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, that if you overthrew Saddam, democracy would flourish across the nations of Islam, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would be solved, and the earth would smell of roses forevermore.

JONATHAN ALTER: So just to come back to George Tenet, you’ve clarified that the “slam dunk” remark was about selling the case, not the intelligence itself. But why did he go forward with such weak intelligence? And why didn’t Colin Powell, before going to the UN to make the case for war, get to the bottom of the fact that they were relying so heavily on information that was bullshit?

TIM WEINER: Bush turned to Colin Powell, the most respected general in American history since Dwight D. Eisenhower, and said, “I need you to sell the case for war.” That is almost a direct quote.

The case was a dossier compiled by Dick Cheney’s shadow National Security Council, including Scooter Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, and others. It was a collection of rumors, gossip, hearsay, innuendo, and bullshit, the cover of which was a mushroom cloud. Parenthetically, large swaths of the American press were complicit in this, including my former newspaper.

“George W. Bush the younger … had a simple attitude: you tried to kill my daddy, I’m going to kill you.”

Powell was supposed to make the case for war in front of the United Nations. You all remember this. Powell is there, and George Tenet is sitting right over his shoulder, saying that everything he is about to tell the world is fact, is ironclad intelligence. None of it was.

Tenet had spent the previous weekend, 72 hours around the clock at CIA headquarters, putting together the case for war. Analysts who had doubts were excluded from that process by Tenet. The top analysts who were there listened to the case being made and knew it was bullshit, but they said nothing.

That silence was a consequence of the fear of the time. We must do this. If we don’t, we will be attacked again.

Then-U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell addresses the United Nations, February 2003

JONATHAN ALTER: I want to go back to late 2001, when we could have gotten bin Laden at Tora Bora, and the CIA blew that too. How did that happen?

TIM WEINER: Well. I was there. I was at Tora Bora in Afghanistan in early December 2001. I had written a pretty hot story saying bin Laden was holed up in the mountain caves there. We rushed down. There were B-52s circling in the blue sky above us, contrails making figure eights.

I was excited. I thought, this is going to be the end of the war on terror, and I’ve got a front-row seat. At that very moment, the president of the United States told the combatant commander, Tommy Franks, that he had to prepare for war against Iraq.

The thread was lost.

JONATHAN ALTER: Bin Laden got away, and it took 10 years to track him down. One of the points you make is that the CIA’s only customer is the president, and that the CIA was never, as Frank Church once said, “a rogue elephant.” It always reflected the president’s priorities.

So let’s go through the presidents of the 21st century, starting with George W. Bush. You’ve touched on this already, but what would you say were his biggest mistakes as they related to the CIA?

TIM WEINER: Every president uses and abuses the CIA in his own way. The thread that runs through every presidency, going back to Harry Truman, is that ideology is the enemy of intelligence. If you are an ideologue, you don’t care what the intelligence says when it contradicts your preconceptions. Your mind is made up. You don’t want to be confused with facts.

Bush operated very much in this mode for the first six and a half years of his presidency. It wasn’t until his third CIA director, General Mike Hayden, who had previously run the National Security Agency, took over that Bush began to listen.

He certainly didn’t listen before 9-11. The CIA told the president 36 times in early 2001 that Al-Qaeda was planning to strike the United States. They didn’t know the time or the place. Bush didn’t believe it. He didn’t want to believe it.

“He certainly didn’t listen before 9-11. The CIA told the president 36 times in early 2001 that Al-Qaeda was planning to strike the United States. They didn’t know the time or the place. Bush didn’t believe it. He didn’t want to believe it.”

In the spring of 2001, George Tenet went to the National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, with his hair on fire and said that something terrible was about to happen and that we needed to go to war against Al-Qaeda. Rice, who is a Soviet expert, said they could not make a policy decision because the president had no policy on Al-Qaeda.

He had no policy on Al-Qaeda because he had no policy on Afghanistan. He had no policy on Afghanistan because he had no policy on Pakistan. And he had no policy on Pakistan because he had no policy on India.

Meanwhile, his Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, was publicly proclaiming that spring that the United States had no national security threats.

JONATHAN ALTER: So let’s go back to the period after 9-11, when the focus shifted to Iraq. What was the Bay of Goats?

TIM WEINER: One of the CIA officers I interviewed was Luis Ruena. Luis became an American because of the Bay of Pigs. He was born in Cuba, and his father was one of the Cubans who worked with the CIA to try to overthrow Fidel Castro. When that failed, his father was imprisoned, and the family eventually fled to the United States.

One day, Luis was ordered to create a covert action plan to overthrow Saddam Hussein. He went around Washington telling the vice president, Paul Wolfowitz, and others that you were not going to overthrow Saddam unless you sent in the 82nd Airborne. Covert action was not going to do it. They didn’t listen.

Instead, they believed they had a secret weapon: a criminal fraudster named Ahmed Chalabi, who had charmed much of the Washington establishment, including far too many reporters. Chalabi was supposed to be the new king of Iraq. The CIA had issued a burn notice on him years earlier, a rare step warning the entire intelligence community to have nothing to do with him because he was a liar and the truth was not in him.

Despite that, Chalabi, who had not been in Baghdad since the late 1950s, became one of the most influential figures shaping American policy toward Iraq. Someone predicted that if the United States backed him, the result would be like the Bay of Pigs, except the Bay of Goats.

It wasn’t the Bay of Goats precisely, but it may have been the worst foreign policy decision by an American president since Lyndon Johnson sent combat troops into Vietnam in 1965.

The question is how the CIA was supposed to do its job, to educate the president about the world and inform the foreign policy it was meant to execute. Under Bush, the entire system broke down.

JONATHAN ALTER: And on top of that, they started torturing people at secret sites. A lot of people saw Zero Dark Thirty, which raised not only the question of whether there was a connection between torture and finding bin Laden, but the broader question of whether torture ever works. That’s something I got on the wrong side of a bit myself in my journalism.

Scene from “Zero Dark Thirty” 2012 (Columbia Pictures)

TIM WEINER: Briefly about the movie Zero Dark Thirty. The CIA has—and always has had—a public information office, and it worked with the screenwriter and producer of that film to help create a storyline that torture worked and that torture blazed the trail to bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad.

That is a lie.

JONATHAN ALTER: What was the real explanation? And then there’s the broader question, which you seem agnostic on: does torture ever work?

TIM WEINER: Okay, those are two big questions.

The path to bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad was blazed not through information extracted by torture, but through old-fashioned espionage. At a time when counterterrorism was swamping everything else, the CIA was recruiting al-Qaeda members in Afghanistan and Pakistan and turning them into agents. That information came from espionage, not torture.

Does torture work? A little history. The CIA was not created to be torturers or to run secret prisons. But at the time, the head of the clandestine service, Jose Rodriguez, turned to the Navy and the Air Force, which had programs training pilots how to resist torture if they were downed behind enemy lines. Those programs included waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and confinement in small boxes.

Some people had been through this. Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of defense under Bush, had experienced it during the Vietnam War. I asked him what it was like, and he said plainly: it was torture.

The Air Force and Navy learned how these techniques worked from the testimony of pilots captured during the Vietnam War and earlier in Korea. But the North Vietnamese were not torturing American pilots to gain intelligence. They didn’t know when the next bombing run was coming. They tortured them to extract false confessions for propaganda.

That salient fact was lost in translation over the years.

JONATHAN ALTER: So to segue to Obama, his view was: don’t torture them, kill them first.

TIM WEINER: It was better to incinerate than incarcerate.

JONATHAN ALTER: And how does that hold up as a national security priority?

TIM WEINER: Kill them all. Let God sort them out. The question is kill or capture. Use drones or deal with them as prisoners. You can’t get intelligence from a corpse. So it is not a solution. And the problem, of course, with kill them all, let God sort them out, is that you are going to kill civilians.

JONATHAN ALTER: And he did. He killed an American citizen by mistake.

TIM WEINER: Well, that’s a different issue. But civilians in villages in places where I’ve been, Afghanistan and Pakistan, just as happened in Vietnam. Killing civilians does not endear you to the populace. It makes the war that you are prosecuting unwinnable. And we saw that in Afghanistan, and we saw that in Iraq. So Obama’s basic policy, he summarized as, don’t do stupid shit.

“So Obama’s basic policy, he summarized as, don’t do stupid shit.”

JONATHAN ALTER: And did he basically make good on that and do fewer dumb things than other presidents?

TIM WEINER: Toward the middle of his second term, Obama dialed this down to almost nothing. He became convinced by people around him, including one of his advisers, Samantha Power, and the deputy director of the CIA at the time, Avril Haines, that the kill-them-all, let-God-sort-them-out strategy was, to put it politely, counterproductive. Bin Laden was dead by then, and by the end of the Obama years, there were other threats. Russia. China. Obama was trying to swivel American intelligence back toward those 20th-century threats.

JONATHAN ALTER: So, before we get to Trump and everybody gets completely depressed, let’s go to some good news. Something very positive that the CIA did. You mentioned a couple of the women involved in the management of the intelligence establishment. I was very interested that there were many important female characters in your story, and the one that I knew the least about was a woman named Paula Doyle. So tell me what she and Robert Gorelick did for this country and the world. This is a great story.

TIM WEINER: Again, we have to go back to the late 20th century. Abdul Qadir Khan was a Pakistani metallurgist. In 1998, Pakistan exploded a nuclear weapon, the Islamic bomb, and Khan was the architect of it. He had spent 25 years importing the technologies needed to build a nuclear weapon into Pakistan.

At that point, unseen by the CIA and the rest of the world, he flipped the switch and became an exporter instead of an importer of nuclear weapons technology. Over the next few years, he dramatically improved the nuclear capabilities of North Korea, Iraq, Iran, and Libya.

The CIA got wind of this. Paula Doyle, who looks like a science teacher in a Catholic grade school and is from a small town in South Dakota, along with her partners Jim “Mad Dog” Lawler and Robert Gorelick, set up a sting. They created a fake nuclear technology proliferation company in Dubai and used it to penetrate Khan’s operation.

By 2001, the CIA had acquired so much material that it could almost have become its own nuclear state. Then, in 2003, they learned that a massive shipment of nuclear weapons technology, roughly 100 tons, was moving from Khan’s base in Malaysia to Qaddafi in Libya. The CIA intercepted the shipment and pressured Qaddafi directly.
Qaddafi decided he did not want to end up on a gallows like Saddam Hussein and renounced his nuclear program.

JONATHAN ALTER: That’s probably the stupidest thing he’s ever done, right? Because we wouldn’t have been able to try to take him out if he had nuclear weapons.

TIM WEINER: I would debate that point. The beauty of this operation was that, in 2003, the CIA, through espionage, destroyed an existential threat of weapons of mass destruction at the very same time the United States was going to war, a disastrous war, against an imaginary threat of weapons of mass destruction.

That underscores my point: espionage is a good thing. That’s why the CIA exists, not to torture or kill people, not to drone them, but to spy on them. Spying is, as everyone knows, the world’s second-oldest profession.

JONATHAN ALTER: We’re going to skip over Biden, who had a disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, but also a major intelligence success in predicting Russia’s invasion.

TIM WEINER: Let me speak to that before we get to Trump. A really monumental event happened in the spring of 2017, in the immediate aftermath of the Russians running what was probably the most successful covert operation since the Trojan horse to manipulate the U.S. presidential election.

A few months later, there was a new chief of the clandestine service, the top spy at the CIA. His name was Tomas Rakusan. He’s Czech. His parents are Czech. He was nine years old when Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring in 1968. His feelings about the Russians were bred in the bone.

Rakusan called in his top people, the top operations officers at the CIA, and said, the Russians just manipulated our fucking election. How do we make sure this never happens again?

And he said to them, take the talents people have. These guys had been doing counterterrorism 24-7, 365, for 15 years. Take the talents you’ve honed in targeting terrorists, figuring out who they are, how they live, who they love, who they hate, and how to recruit them, and train those talents on the Russians. Recruit Russian spies. Russian diplomats. Russian oligarchs.

And the upshot was, four years later, the CIA stole Vladimir Putin’s war plans for Ukraine. The CIA had been trying to penetrate the Kremlin since 1947, a record that was, with a few exceptions, unblemished by success until this. Stealing your opponent’s war plans, that’s a neat trick.

JONATHAN ALTER: Although they were wrong in thinking that Ukraine was going to lose in short order.

TIM WEINER: That’s a quibble. And they told the world about it. The CIA is not in the habit of telling the world when it steals a big secret. It didn’t stop the war, but it had an immediate galvanizing effect on the nations of Europe.

JONATHAN ALTER: So that was a very good decision. To support Ukraine. And Joe Biden made a really good decision in declassifying all of that intelligence to create the coalition.

TIM WEINER: Yes. It was the CIA director Bill Burns’s imperative.

JONATHAN ALTER: So just one more thing about Trump. You argue that he’s not Putin’s agent so much as his ally, consorting with an adversary the United States has faced for 70 years.

How does that affect the mission of Russia House at the CIA? What happens to those parts of the agency when Russia is no longer treated as an adversary by the president?

TIM WEINER: Oh, it’s still our adversary.

JONATHAN ALTER: Well, Trump doesn’t think it is.

TIM WEINER: I’ll back up a bit. I came of age when Richard Nixon was president. As we learned from the Church Committee report, we saw what happens when an intelligence service is under the command of a lawless president. The dangers of a secret intelligence service in an American democracy governed by a lawless president are immense.

The greater danger now is that the president of the United States is dismantling the architecture of American national security created after World War II to protect the United States and its allies against, among other things, Russian imperialism.

There has been a purge at the CIA, the FBI, and the Pentagon of anyone unwilling to swear fealty to Donald Trump. Anyone who worked on the investigations into Russia’s interference in our elections. Anyone who supported Ukraine. Anyone who opposed Russia.

JONATHAN ALTER: You say that 16 people you quoted in the book, all of them former CIA officials speaking on the record, have had their security clearances revoked. So if you had waited a few months to do this book, you wouldn’t have been able to report it.

TIM WEINER: I don’t think this book could be reported now. This ideological purge sweeping the CIA, the State Department, the Pentagon, and the entire national security and intelligence establishment is increasing the risk of a catastrophic, systemic intelligence failure of the kind we’ve experienced before.

The purge of people for ideological reasons across the national security apparatus carries a historical parallel. I don’t want to overdraw it, but in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, people were purged because they wore glasses, because they could read. Today, people are being purged from the diplomatic, intelligence, and national security establishment because they see things clearly.

The president has set fire to the national security establishment of the United States, the so-called deep state.

JONATHAN ALTER: Just one quick follow-up on that. Is the clandestine service disabled, too, or is Trump secretly doing all these things around the world right now?

TIM WEINER: The clandestine service is still capable of doing remarkable things, including helping snatch the president of Venezuela out of his safe house in the dead of night.

What it is not doing is the most important thing America could be doing right now: working for the survival of Ukraine. Putin has declared war across Europe through assassination, sabotage, subversion, propaganda, and political warfare. If he is allowed to keep a single square inch of Ukraine, he will not stop there.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 1: When do you think or would you say Trump was compromised by the Soviets or Russians?

TIM WEINER: This is a question that those of us interested in such matters have been grappling with for ten years. I’ve come to the conclusion that Trump likes Putin because he wants to be like Putin.

That said, Trump first went to Moscow in 1987, a rich American businessman with a taste for Slavic women, looking to build a hotel in Red Square in partnership with the Soviet government. He was already cheating on his first wife. If the KGB did not target him at that point, they would have been guilty of criminal negligence.

“Trump first went to Moscow in 1987, a rich American businessman with a taste for Slavic women, looking to build a hotel in Red Square in partnership with the Soviet government. He was already cheating on his first wife. If the KGB did not target him at that point, they would have been guilty of criminal negligence.”

AUDIENCE MEMBER 2: Tulsi Gabbard. Is she a threat to the country right now where she sits?

TIM WEINER: Tulsi Gabbard is, by title, the Director of National Intelligence, the bureaucratic supremo of the American intelligence community. She is a crackpot and a conspiracy theorist and has, at this point, been written out of the intelligence community.

Her shop is called the Directorate of National Intelligence. The Trump administration takes those initials to mean do not inform. She’s a danger to herself and to others, including us.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 3: In your previous book, you wrote that a generation of Iranians grew up knowing the CIA had played a major role in installing a deeply oppressive government. In the current context, what does the evidence show about the CIA’s presence in Iran today, or its ability to operate there at all?

TIM WEINER: To my knowledge, the CIA operates largely through the Israelis to assassinate, subvert, and undermine the Iranian regime, particularly its nuclear scientists. There are probably, and this is a rough estimate, about ten people at the CIA capable of working undercover in Iran. Possibly fewer.

The Israelis have been at this for a very long time, and they are enormously influential within the intelligence community in shaping U.S. policy toward Iran, for better or for worse, probably the latter.

Subscribe to Old Goats with Jonathan Alter, where this article originally appeared.

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