Knowingo
The cover of The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century

The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century

Tim Weiner, 2025

A history of the modern CIA: ignored warnings before 9/11, torture and Iraq, digital age espionage, Ukraine, and the danger of presidents who reject intelligence.

Get the app Read on the web

12 parts, about 24 minutes to read.

Why read it

  • See the CIA through its two missions, knowing adversaries well enough to warn presidents and acting covertly to change events
  • Follow how bad sources, softened dissent and officials who wanted war turned the Iraq weapons case into a disastrous miscalculation
  • Compare slow patient espionage, such as exposing a nuclear smuggling network, with fast covert war and torture, and what each cost

Who it is for

  • Readers following the war on terror and its moral aftermath
  • Citizens weighing how much secrecy a democracy should grant its spies
  • Students of intelligence, foreign policy and presidential power

What the summary covers

  1. Knowing the World, Changing the World2 min
  2. The Warnings Before the Fire2 min
  3. A Civilian Service Becomes a Secret Army2 min
  4. Fear, Torture, and the Road to Iraq2 min
  5. What Good Espionage Could Still Do2 min
  6. The Cost Comes Due2 min
  7. Surge Intelligence and the Drone Turn2 min
  8. Secrets Become Easier to Steal2 min
  9. Moral Reckoning Meets Great Power Return2 min
  10. Politics Turns Against Intelligence2 min
  11. Burns and the Return of Human Intelligence2 min
  12. The Last Warning2 min

Recommended by

  • Sir Richard DearloveFormer head of MI6, Britain's Secret Intelligence Service

About the author

  • Tim WeinerAmerican reporter and author who won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting
    • Born in White Plains, New York, on June 20, 1956
    • Graduated from Columbia University in 1978 with a degree in history and from its Graduate School of Journalism in 1979
    • Shared the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting while at the Kansas City Times, for coverage of the Hyatt Regency skywalk collapse of July 1981
    • Reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer from 1982 to 1992, and won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for a series on secret military and intelligence programs
    • His Pulitzer winning series on the Pentagon and CIA black budget became the book Blank Check: The Pentagon's Black Budget
    • Worked for The New York Times from 1993 to 2009, as a foreign correspondent in Mexico, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Sudan and then as a national security correspondent in Washington
    • At the New York Times he covered the CIA in Washington and conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and many other nations
    • Won the National Book Award in Nonfiction for his 2007 book Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, the first volume of his CIA history that The Mission continues

More books like this