This is a superbly reseached work and tales the shadowy tale of American foreign policy from the late 40's to the present day. But it is really a 700 page indictment of an example of how bad a government agency can be. The one thing the CIA did well was give money away, BILLIONS of dollars spent with a slim margin of return at best, a...nd at worse it became clear that the CIA had literally been conned out of hundreds of millions by other states and even individuals. But any work of journalism, to be regarded as great, must be objective and here is the problem with this book: it is such a pervasivley negative account, it reports that the CIA is so off the charts bad, that a reader wonders if Weiner is just slamming them page after page. Surely in over 60 years of service the CIA has done something right. To his credit, he documents a rebuttal by a CIA director that says essentially that their greatest successes were secret while only their many failures were known publically. This could be true, but Weiner has created a work that dramatically documents an ascerbic, scathing history of the CIA, describing them as air conditioned, comfortable bureacrats in the suburbs of Virginia and Maryland, far from the image of worldly and competent super spy that the agency wishes to be portayed. The agents and analysists may see themselves as James Bond, but Weiner describes them more like the John Malkovitch character from the Coen Brothers film Burn After Reading: inept, arrogant, ineffective, detached from reality and drunk. Presidents have privately called the agents of the CIA clowns, jerks, idiots, drunks, thieves, and liars.

Allen Dulles, one the earlies and most influential directors, used to heft a report to determine how heay it was, rather than actually reading it. He even did this in front of the author of the report, and may have blithley given it back with an instruction that it needed more, if it were too light. Later in his career he may watch a Washington Senators baseball game, ignoring the agent who was trying to brief him on some issue.

Early on the CIA used the communists against the fascists, and later sided with fascists against the communists. The CIA's battle with communism was its early raison d'etre and the fall of the Soviet Union caused many lifelong agents to mourn the passing of its foe as a sign that their time too had come.

The CIA had stumbled across early terrorsist plots by the PLO and had indications that sub-state level terror may be the wave of the future but did little to prevent the rise of the terrorists, largely due to the fact that thier credibility at the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department had diminshed to the point where the CIA had become an almost ran in terms of US foreign policy.

Some of the notoriously bad predictions of the CIA:
The Soviet Union will not invade Afghanistan
The Shah of Iran is safe from revolution
There is no liklihood of Soviet missles in Cuba
China will not invade Korea.
We are absolutely winning the war in Vietnam.
Don't worry about an embassy attack in Iran.
Iraq will not invade Kuwait. (A senior CIA official learned of the invasion from his neighbor who had seen it on CNN)
And worst of all, a case of the boy who cries wolf in 2001, as CIA officials actually had some idea of plots in existence, but the seriousness of the reports were corrupted by decades of poor intelligence and the weakened esteem at the White House and so the reports went relatively unheeded by the Clinton and Bush administrations.

With the attacks of 9/11 in 2001, the CIA's worst nightmare had been realized as the CIA had failed to prevent a second Pearl Harbor. Later on, the politics and ineffectiveness of the the agency contributed to the poor intelligence that led to the US invasion of Iraq as the CIA produced reports based upon faulty intelligence gathering, hearsay, and was essentially aimed at delivering news that Bush wanted to hear rather than telling the truth that they just did not know for sure what Iraq had in terms of WMD. Scary book if it as true as it appears.