The CIA in the 21st Century

The mission of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency is extremely hazardous, writes Tim Weiner in his July 2025 book, The Mission: the CIA in the 21st century. Collecting intelligence runs many risks and can test limits of legality.

Weiner, a winner of a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, weaves these themes through his survey of the history of the CIA in the 21st century, based on more than 100 on-the-record interviews with CIA directors and officers. He has previously written a history of the CIA from its postwar creation until the war on terror, ​​Legacy of Ashes: the history of the CIA.

With the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union, the CIA lost its reason for being, which was protecting the United States and the West against its communist enemies, according to Weiner. The agency lost prominence through the 1990s, and then counter-terrorism replaced the war on communism as the new mission of the agency.

Following that, in the northern summer of 2002, the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee requested a national intelligence estimate of the status of Saddam Hussein’s arsenal. In reality, the CIA didn’t have any up-to-date intelligence or espionage capabilities for Iraq – the CIA had not had a spy in Iraq since 1998.

Nevertheless, the CIA put together a national intelligence estimate which reported that Saddam had nuclear, biological and chemical weapons capabilities far beyond what he actually had. Moreover, the CIA informed the world that Iraq had these weapons and that Iraq posed a severe danger. The CIA was influenced by Saddam’s desire for the CIA and his mortal enemies, the Iranians, to believe he had these weapons as a deterrent. This cloud of poor reporting hung over the CIA for many years.

After 9/11, the U.S. government called upon the CIA to be the tip of the spear for the war on terror. As a lethal paramilitary force, it erected secret prisons and inflicted torture during interrogations, something it was not set up to do. This diversion away from the CIA’s core business of espionage only served to further tarnish the agency’s reputation. Weiner says the CIA’s mission is to spy, in particular by recruiting foreigners to commit treason against their own countries by telling the CIA what is really going on behind closed doors in the high councils of Russia, Iran and other foreign powers.

In China, the agency recruited a network of up-and-coming officials as spies by financing the fees required to obtain promotions. But under Chinese President Xi Jinping’s leadership, these spies were uncovered and killed. The CIA’s role and reputation took a positive turn following Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The agency’s clandestine services team then used its counter-terrorism skills to penetrate the Kremlin by recruiting Russian spies, diplomats and oligarchs.

The upshot of this was that the CIA was able to steal Putin’s war plans for Ukraine. Even more audaciously, the plans were revealed to the world. Despite initial scepticism, this had a galvanising effect on NATO countries. Weiner says that global CIA activities such as this rely on cooperation with a large number of foreign intelligence services, something that is essential for the CIA to be an effective global intelligence agency. This cooperation is endangered by the present deterioration in U.S. relations with traditional allies and partners. Working-level cooperation may be continuing for the moment, but will likely be threatened.

Weiner is pessimistic about the current direction of the CIA. President Donald Trump has little faith in U.S. intelligence and believes that the CIA is the capital of the deep state. Many senior analysts and recent hires have been dismissed. The CIA’s diversity policy has been abolished despite diversity being one of the agency’s key strengths. Agents with diverse cultural backgrounds and language skills are essential for collecting global intelligence.

Weiner concludes that the great risk is that, by not listening to the CIA’s intelligence and weakening its capabilities, the U.S. government is severely and unnecessarily weakening national security.

John West is the author of Asian Century … on a Knife-edge and executive director of the Asian Century Institute. His career has included major stints at the Australian Treasury, the OECD, the Asian Development Bank Institute and Tokyo’s Sophia University.

AI contributed no ideas to this article – John West.

This article appeared originally at The Strategist (ASPI).