18 Quotes by Tim Weiner

The CIA’s officers in Baghdad and in Washington tried to warn that the path the president was pursuing in Iraq was disastrous. They said the United States could not run a country it did not understand. Their words carried no weight at the White House. They were heresy in an administration whose policies were based on faith.

There weren’t any moderates left in the government of Iran.

The CIA not only missed the invasion, it refused to admit that it had missed it. Why would anyone in his right mind invade Afghanistan, graveyard of conquerors for two thousand years? A lack of intelligence was not the cause of the failure. A lack of imagination was.

The myth about the CIA dated back to the Bay of Pigs: that all its successes were secret, that only its failures were trumpeted. The truth was that the CIA could not succeed without recruiting and sustaining skilled and daring officers and foreign agents. The agency failed daily at that mission, and to pretend otherwise was a delusion.

Washington was a small town run by people who believed that they lived in the center of the universe.

To the CIA, everyone’s an outsider.

At the root of this failure of intelligence was “our national ignorance of Vietnamese history, society, and language,” he said.

For sixty years tens of thousands of clandestine service officers have gathered only the barest threads of truly important intelligence – and that is the CIA’s deepest secret.

By ordering the director of central intelligence to conduct a program of domestic surveillance, Kennedy set a precedent that Presidents Johnson, Nixon, and George W. Bush would follow.