In The Mission, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tim Weiner follows up on his 2007 National Book Award-winning history of the Central Intelligence Agency, Legacy of Ashes, to document the torturous permutations of the agency's mission in the 21st century. Since 2000, Weiner writes, the CIA was "twice transformed" by a lack of good intelligence: the first in preventing the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the second in making the false case for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
Weiner goes deep into CIA leadership with riveting first-person recollections of those who witnessed the agency pivot away from its primary mission of espionage and counterespionage to that of a paramilitary force responsible for leading the hunt for al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and beyond. This mission shift resulted in endless scandals and congressional hearings over events at the Abu Ghraib prison and the use of torture at CIA "black sites" around the globe. Drawing on rare on-the-record interviews with six former CIA directors, more than a dozen station chiefs, and countless operation officers, Weiner's taut account climaxes with the CIA's most dangerous foe as of 2025. President Donald Trump repeatedly undermined the agency and its operatives by "embracing dictators and despots" in his first term, and his plans for his second term might require "a handful of CIA officers with the greatest morality" to stop him from damaging U.S. security beyond repair. The Mission is a penetrating portrait of the nation's most powerful intelligence service and its existential evolution as a last line of defense against enemies foreign and domestic. --Peggy Kurkowski, book reviewer in Denver