The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century

by Tim Weiner

In Legacy of Ashes, American journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Tim Weiner told the story of the CIA in the 20th century, an agency set up to collect information but pressed by successive presidents into carrying out covert action. The Mission, according to Weiner, is “the first chronicle of the twenty-first century CIA, told in the words of those who lived it.” It opens with the run-up to 9/11 and a defunded and demoralized CIA finding its way again following the disappearance of its chief raison d’être, the Soviet Union.