Quotes from Tim Weiner

Intelligence fails because it is human, no stronger than the power of one mind to understand another. (480)

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

Re: J. Edgar Hoover] His knowledge was enormous, though his mind was narrow.

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.

Never had so much intelligence meant so little. The conduct of the war had been set by a series of lies that the leaders of the United States told one another and the American people.

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.

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.

In the cold war, the CIA was condemned by the American left for what it did. In the war on terror, the CIA was attacked by the American right for what it could not do. The charge was incompetence, leveled by such men as Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld. Say what one may about their leadership, they knew from long experience what the reader now knows: the CIA was unable to fulfill its role as America's intelligence service.

The American people are suckers," Nixon said. "Gray Middle America—they're suckers.

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

The ability to represent failure as success would become an Agency tradition.

We're not going to lose it. That's all there is to it," Richard Nixon said to Kissinger on February 18, as Lam Son 719 became a debacle. "We can't lose. We can lose an election, but we're not going to lose this war, Henry.… North Vietnam can never beat South Vietnam. Never.

They said Indonesia was a failure," Al Pope reflected bitterly. "But we knocked the shit out of them. We killed thousands of Communists, even though half of them probably didn't even know what Communism meant.

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

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.

To the CIA, everyone's an outsider.

As a consequence of its cultural myopia, the CIA misread the world.

They might not love Big Brother, but they knew he was part of the family now.

So street-level FBI agents turned secrets into information, and senior FBI leaders brought that information to reporters, to prosecutors, to federal grand juries, and into the public realm. That was the beginning of the end of Richard Nixon's presidency. Without the FBI, the reporters would have been lost.

On October 20, 2011, the rebels overran Qaddafi's last stronghold, found him hiding in a drainpipe, sodomized him with a bayonet, and killed him, capturing his last moments on video. Putin watched that tape over and over again, probably thinking that this was what happened when America wanted to change a regime—Miloševi? dead in a prison cell, Saddam with a noose around his neck, Qaddafi on the wrong end of a spear.

Their attempts to make sense of the world had carried heat but little light.

and throughout the summer and fall of 2002, the president and his aides prepared the battlefield of the American mind with apocalyptic warnings about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction: Baghdad had chemical and biological weapons, and it could build a nuclear weapon in a few years. The alarms were terrifying, and utterly false. The cause for war was an illusion.

The president of the Russian Academy of Military Sciences, Makhmut Gareyev, a retired general who had served in the Red Army from 1941 to 1992, was highly attuned to the power of disinformation as an instrument of war: "The systematic broadcasting of … partially truthful and false items" could create "mass psychosis, despair and feelings of doom, and undermine trust in the government … creating a fruitful soil for actions of the enemy.

the president's oath to take care that the laws are faithfully executed, and presidents have strained against the strictures of that oath since World War I.