'The Risk of a Catastrophic Intelligence Failure is Now Higher Than at Any Time This Century'

JP O'Malley interviews Pulitzer Prize winning author, journalist and longtime CIA watcher, Tim Weiner about his new book, 'The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century'

Tim Weiner

Tim Weiner first set foot in CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, in early 1988. “As I walked into the lobby of the building I saw engraved on the wall, a quote from the Gospel of John: And ye shall know the truth, and the truth will make you free,” the 69-year-old American journalist and author recalls from his home in Brooklyn, New York.

The irony was not lost on Weiner, who was then a young reporter. Still, he believed in the fundamental premise of those words. It’s why he had become a journalist in the first place.

That May— for a series of articles he published as a Washington correspondent for The Philadelphia Inquirer exposing the secret spending of the Pentagon and the CIA— Weiner won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. His research involved travelling to Afghanistan, where he investigated the CIA’s multibillion-dollar arms shipments to the Afghan mujahadeen, then fighting Soviet occupiers. This last great battle of the cold war got a mention in Weiner’s first book, Blank Check: The Pentagon’s Black Budget (1990). “At the time, I didn’t actually know that much about the CIA,” says Weiner. “But I eventually interviewed many people who had served there for decades, including [the late] Richard Helms.”

During the Cuban missile crisis (1962) and the early days of the Vietnam War (1955-1975) Helms was the chief of the CIA’s clandestine service. From 1966 to 1973 he’d served as CIA director but was eventually fired by President Nixon for refusing to cover up the Watergate scandal. Under Helms’s leadership, the CIA carried out numerous botched attempts to assassinate Cuban president, Fidel Castro; it also helped overthrow Salvador Allende’s democratically elected far-left government in Chile in 1973; and it funded MK-ULTRA— a decade-long mind control experiment that involved invasive experiments on American and Canadian patients, using psychedelic drugs and electroshock treatment.