How the CIA lost the war on terror

By the autumn of 2021, just a few months after the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, the emerging consensus in the US intelligence community was that Russia was laying the groundwork for a huge invasion of Ukraine, including the capture of Kyiv. By late January 2022, an avalanche of evidence – some of it “exquisite”, in intelligence parlance – revealed that the decision to give the green light was imminent.

As someone who was in government service at the time, I travelled to Moscow, Kyiv and several other European capitals in the weeks preceding the invasion. These unique insights formed the backdrop to every conversation we had. The first question was whether anything could be done to change Vladimir Putin’s calculus in the final days and hours. The next was whether Ukraine would be able to mount a serious resistance against what, according to the same assessments, was an overwhelmingly superior military force.

In a highly unusual move, the US, along with the UK, began to declassify information to expose Russian plans, put pressure on Moscow, build the case for a huge package of sanctions and mobilise international support for Ukraine. On 17 February, a week before Russia’s invasion, US secretary of state Antony Blinken appeared before the UN Security Council. He laid out evidence of Russian troop movements and painted a vivid scenario of how the Kremlin could engineer a pretext for military action, such as with a false flag “terrorist” bombing inside Russia, linked to Ukraine. He revealed that the Kremlin had already prepared a video depicting an explosion, victims and distraught mourners. But, outside the Five Eyes intelligence alliance of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US, the international community was unconvinced. “Now, I am mindful that some have called into question our information, recalling previous instances where intelligence did not ultimately bear out,” Blinken pleaded, “but let me be clear: I am here today not to start a war, but to prevent one.”

Credibility in international affairs is hard to win and easy to lose. Two decades earlier, on 5 February 2003, George W Bush’s secretary of state, Colin Powell, had been sitting in front of the same forum doing the same thing: using declassified intelligence to warn the international community. He was there to make the case that Saddam Hussein was in violation of UN resolutions by concealing a programme to develop “weapons of mass destruction” (WMDs). Infamously, and to Powell’s immense personal regret, such weapons were never found.

Behind both these epoch-defining speeches lay the handiwork of the Central Intelligence Agency. Established in 1947 to fight the cold war, with a predominant focus on Russia, it had rediscovered its mojo in the run-up to the 2022 invasion and was to play a vital role in Ukraine’s defence. And yet, as Tim Weiner explains in The Mission, the CIA’s 21st-century record, just like its 20th-century one, was pockmarked with missteps, controversy, ineptitude and a level of skulduggery that plunged far below its own ethical baseline. Above all, like much of American foreign policy, it was bent badly out of shape by the “war on terror” that began on 12 September 2001.

In the lobby of the CIA headquarters in leafy Langley, Virginia, there is an engraving from the Gospel of John: “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” In the days before his 2003 UN address, Powell had decamped to the boardroom at Langley, testing and retesting every claim he was being asked to make with the CIA director of the time, George Tenet. He was assured that evidence of mobile biological weapons labs was supported by satellite images, and by the testimony of an Iraqi chemical engineer and informant codenamed Curveball. Yet the so-called “slam dunk case” on WMDs, one which Tenet had affirmed to President Bush a few months before, turned out to be nothing of the sort. Besides, the CIA had other business. For almost a year, it had been embedding agents in Iraq – deepening their ties with dissidents and worming their way into the regime, in preparation for the US-led attempt to overthrow Saddam.

The Mission is Weiner’s second book on the CIA, following Legacy of Ashes, which covered the period from the agency’s creation at the end of the second world war to the administration of George W Bush. That book, which was highly critical of the organisation, exposed several grave errors made by the CIA, though some scholars thought Weiner’s work too polemical to be regarded as a balanced history. The Mission is a fantastic read but will be light on revelations for those who have closely followed the WikiLeaks saga or major foreign policy debates of the last 25 years. That said, interviews with six former CIA directors and numerous station chiefs and operatives do bring to the fore the very fallible humans who are at the centre of the story.

There is plenty here to support Weiner’s central proposition: that the CIA was at a loss with what to do with itself until 9/11 caused its budget to balloon exponentially, giving it a new missionary zeal and too much latitude for its own good. There were some stunning successes, such as the neutering of Abdul Qadeer Khan – the “father” of Pakistan’s atomic weapons programme – and the eventual capture of Osama bin Laden. But there was also a surfeit of scandal, shame and inadequacy: the perceived fabrication of intelligence; the policy of extraordinary rendition; the torture and abuse scandals of Abu Ghraib in Iraq; the establishment of Guantánamo Bay detention camp; the industrialisation of targeted killings via drones; and, perhaps most damaging to its long-term credibility, several catastrophic security breaches from within its own ranks.

For an organisation that is supposed to operate in the shadows, the rolling psychodrama surrounding its leadership is quite something to behold. Tenet’s failure to provide Powell with robust evidence may have had something to do with the sword of Damocles that others in the Bush administration made clear was always hanging over his head. Even David Petraeus, the erudite four-star general and erstwhile hero of the US national security establishment, was embroiled in a scandal over an extramarital affair in which questions were raised over the sharing of classified material.

In many ways, today the agency is better placed to deal with the state-on-state competition around which US national security strategy has been reconstructed – more so than the fraught ethical dilemmas of the war on terror and the meandering and ineffective “war on drugs”. But the fierce polarisation of US domestic politics – including the railing against the “deep state” from the Maga movement – has given it a very different sort of challenge at home. In a cri de coeur against Trumpism in the second half of the book, Weiner adopts a more sympathetic stance to the agency, suggesting that domestic politics may be the greatest threat to its future.

The author is not averse to giving credit where credit is due. Mike Pompeo, as CIA director, was very effective with Donald Trump during his first term. Arguably the best performer as chief in recent years has been Bill Burns, who served the whole four years of the Biden administration. A veteran of the Department of State, Burns became de facto chief diplomat on several of the thorniest issues Biden faced, from Eurasia to the Middle East. Burns, who previously served as ambassador to Russia, was deemed to have the greatest credibility in trying to dissuade the Kremlin from invasion before Christmas 2021. More successfully, as Weiner outlines, it was Burns who passed the message warning against further escalation when it appeared that Putin was considering the use of a tactical nuclear weapon in autumn 2022. The road not taken is sometimes where the greatest triumphs of intelligence lie.

This episode – and the many more inglorious ones that feature in The Mission – remind us of the importance of the human element when it comes to high-stakes diplomacy, and the life-and-death decisions on which our national security depends. It is a lesson that is even more important in an era of ocean-bottom-trawling signals intelligence, enabled by advances in AI. In the history of the CIA, great human ingenuity and bravery sit alongside human error, groupthink and deep organisational flaws. But in this age of personality politics, a special insight into the strengths and weaknesses of humans, and organisations made up of humans, is indispensable. For all its failures, if the CIA didn’t exist, you would probably have to invent it.

The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century by Tim Weiner is published by William Collins (£25). Order a copy from observershop.co.uk for £22.50. Delivery charges may apply

Photography by Charles Ommanney/Getty