John Simpson in The Guardian:
In 1976 when we were both based in Brussels, my BBC mentor, the great Charles Wheeler, came back to the office from a grand US embassy party one evening and remarked: “The cleverest and most entertaining people at these things are always CIA. Makes it all the harder to understand why they get everything wrong.” An exaggeration, of course, but one with a degree of truth to it. Why has an organisation with huge amounts of money at its disposal, a record of recruiting the brightest and the best, and the widest of remits, failed to notch up a better record? It’s true that we may not know about many of the CIA’s successes. But we know about a lot of its failures, and some of them have marked US history ineradicably.
In The Mission, Tim Weiner, whose reporting on the CIA in the New York Times was always essential reading, and whose subsequent books on the US intelligence community have a place on the shelves of anyone interested in international affairs, provides a variety of answers to this essential question.
More here.
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