The Mission

The CIA in the 21st Century

Tim Weiner

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9780063270190
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: History

New York Times Bestseller * A New Yorker Best Book of 2025 * A New York Times Editors' Choice

"No one has opened up the CIA to us like Weiner has, and The Mission deserves to win Weiner a second Pulitzer." —The Guardian

A masterpiece of reporting based on-the-record interviews with six former CIA directors and scores of spies, station chiefs, and top operations officers: The Mission is a gripping and revelatory history of the modern CIA, reaching from 9/11 through its covert operations in Afghanistan and Iraq to today’s secret battles with Russia and China, concluding with the Agency's own fight for survival under the current president of the United States

Tim Weiner's epic successor to Legacy of Ashes, his National Book Award–winning classic about the CIA's first sixty years

At the turn of the century, the Central Intelligence Agency was in crisis. The end of the Cold War had robbed the agency of its mission. More than thirty overseas stations and bases had been shuttered, and scores that remained had been severely cut back. Many countries where surveillance was once deemed crucial went uncovered. Essential intelligence wasn’t being collected. At the dawn of the information age, the CIA’s officers and analysts worked with outmoded technology, struggling to distinguish the clear signals of significant facts from the cacophony of background noise.

Then came September 11th, 2001. After the attacks, the CIA transformed itself into a lethal paramilitary force, running secret prisons and brutal interrogations, mounting deadly drone attacks, and all but abandoning its core missions of espionage and counterespionage. The consequences were grave: the deaths of scores of its recruited foreign agents, the theft of its personnel files by Chinese spies, the penetration of its computer networks by Russian intelligence and American hackers, and the tragedies of Afghanistan and Iraq. A new generation of spies now must fight the hardest targets—Moscow, Beijing, Tehran—while confronting a president who has attacked the CIA as a subversive force. 

From Pulitzer Prize winner Tim Weiner, The Mission tells the gripping, high-stakes story of the CIA through the first quarter of the twenty-first century, revealing how the agency fought to rebuild the espionage powers it lost during the war on terror—and finally succeeded in penetrating the Kremlin. The struggle has life-and-death consequences for America and its allies. The CIA must reclaim its original mission: know thy enemies. The fate of the free world hangs in the balance. 

A masterpiece of reporting, The Mission includes exclusive on-the-record interviews with six former CIA directors, the top spymaster, thirteen station chiefs, and scores of top operations officers who served undercover for decades and have never spoken to a journalist before.  

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Prologue: The Spy and the Scribe
• Chapter One: The Dark Horizon
• Chapter Two: Denial and Deception
• Chapter Three: “It Was All Sadly Absurd”
• Chapter Four: The Bay of Goats
• Chapter Five: The New World
• Chapter Six: “We Were All Making It Up as We Went Along”
• Chapter Seven: Unprecedented Trouble
• Chapter Eight: What You Do When You Do Not Know
• Chapter Nine: Sufi Mystics and Walking Zombies
• Chapter Ten: A Beautiful Operation
• Chapter Eleven: The Butcher’s Bill
• Chapter Twelve: Guerrilla Warfare
• Chapter Thirteen: The Black Cloud
• Chapter Fourteen: “How Far Were We Prepared to Go?”
• Chapter Fifteen: The God’s-Eye View
• Chapter Sixteen: No Middle Ground
• Chapter Seventeen: The Keys to the Castle
• Chapter Eighteen: The Right Side of History
• Chapter Nineteen: “Someone Is Always Watching”
• Chapter Twenty: Lethal and Legal
• Chapter Twenty-One: Face-Eating Baboons
• Chapter Twenty-Two: The Useful Idiot
• Chapter Twenty-Three: Ring-Kissing and Kneecapping
• Chapter Twenty-Four: The Enemy of Intelligence
• Chapter Twenty-Five: “We Are on the Way to a Right-Wing Coup”
• Chapter Twenty-Six: The Glory Gate
• Chapter Twenty-Seven: Human Intelligence
• Chapter Twenty-Eight: The Morality of Espionage
• Epilogue: Autocracy in America
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author
• About Mariner Books
• Also by Tim Weiner
• Copyright
• About the Publisher