Quotes from Tim Weiner

On July 29, 2008, paramilitary forces in South Ossetia began shelling Georgian villages. On the night of August 7, the government panicked. The Georgian military launched artillery into the enclave's provincial capital. And then the Russians struck after midnight. Putin's tanks and troops rolled south, the first Russian military invasion of a sovereign nation in nearly thirty years,

On July 6, he gave a speech to newspaper and television executives at the great columned building housing the National Archives and the original copy of the Constitution of the United States. "When I see those columns," he said, "I think of what happened to Greece and Rome." "They lost their will to live," he said. "They became subject to the decadence that destroys civilization. The United States is reaching that period.

Georgia was hit with a massive coordinated cyberattack in the first minutes of the war. It immediately struck fifty-four websites in the capital of Tbilisi, obliterating news and information. In a few hours, one-third of the nation's computer networks went down, including the official sites of Saakashvili, his government, and his ministries of defense and foreign affairs.

The OSS had developed a uniquely American cadre of intelligence analysts, but Donovan and his star officer, Allen W. Dulles, were enthralled by espionage and sabotage, skills at which Americans were amateurs. Donovan depended on British intelligence to school his men in the dark arts. The bravest of the OSS, the ones who inspired legends, were the men who jumped behind enemy lines, running guns, blowing up bridges, plotting against the Nazis with the French and the Balkan resistance movements.

To his enduring sorrow, Bill Clinton chose yet another pious judge to run the Bureau.

He was arguably the best-qualified FBI director since J. Edgar Hoover; he thought Clinton was the most talented politician since Richard Nixon. That made their mutual contempt all the more tragic. It undermined the FBI and ultimately damaged the United States.

nuclear missiles? How many tanks?

SHORTLY AFTER Louis Freeh was sworn in as the fifth director of the FBI on September 1, 1993, he turned in his White House pass. He refused to enter the Oval Office. His reasons were pure and simple. Freeh regarded President Clinton not as commander in chief but as the subject of a criminal case. The

Freeh knew the estrangement undermined the FBI. "The lost resources and lost time alone were monumental," he wrote. "So much that should have been straightforward became problematic in the extreme." But he felt compelled to keep a distance from the president. It deepened as the years went by. It became a danger to the United States.

Freeh infuriated the White House almost every day for more than seven years. One case among many was the FBI's immense investigation into allegations that China's intelligence services had bought political influence at the White House through illegal campaign contributions.

But Freeh's FBI managed to bury the fact that its most highly valued source on Chinese espionage in the United States, a politically wired California woman named Katrina Leung, had been spying for China throughout the 1980s and 1990s. All the while, she was having sex with the special agent in charge of her case, a top supervisor of the FBI's China Squad, James J. Smith—and occasionally with a leading FBI counterintelligence expert on China, William Cleveland.

Truman said he only needed a daily intelligence digest to keep from having to read a two-foot stack of cables every morning.

But no one wanted to embarrass the Bureau. The case festered for years. Not until after Freeh's departure was it clear that the Chinese, Russian, and Cuban intelligence services all had penetrated the FBI in the 1990s. So had a member of the world's most dangerous and least-known terrorist organization. His name was Ali Mohamed. Al-Qaeda had a double agent posing as an informer for the FBI.

From 1966 to 1976 ... The primary cause in [the] decline in FBI counterespionage and counterintelligence cases was the ceaseless demand by Presidents Johnson and Nixon to focus on the political warfare against the American left.... - "Espionage Against the United States by American Citizens, 1947-2001, Defense Personnel Security Research Center, July 2002

Yeah, it's a cover-up," Nixon said. "The cover-up is worse than whatever comes out. It really is—unless somebody is going to jail.

He saw "new propaganda" emerging, and he said its goal was "not to convince or persuade, but to keep the viewer hooked and distracted, passive and paranoid." RT, which received more than $1 billion a year from the Kremlin, began to fine-tune its English-language shows, targeting the fringes of the American political spectrum on the right and the left.

Fitzgerald and the FBI agents who worked with him in New York all knew that Ali Mohamed was working for al-Qaeda. They decided to arrest him then and there. Two years later, he pleaded guilty in open court to serving as bin Laden's first deep-penetration agent in America and a key conspirator in the embassy bombings. Then the United States made him vanish; no record of his imprisonment exists. He was an embarrassment to the FBI.

Shortly after Putin began his third term, a shadowy organization called the Internet Research Agency, a troll farm in Saint Petersburg financed by a Kremlin oligarch, began planning to target American voters, using techniques of disinformation and deception that it was already testing on Russian citizens and their neighbors in Eastern Europe.

He started the damn thing!" Nixon said in a taped telephone conversation with his spiritual adviser, the Reverend Billy Graham. "He killed Diem!

It takes 5 to 7 years to turn a novice into a case officer capable of working in the capitals of the world.

Firtash was the Ukrainian middleman for Gazprom, the Russian state-run natural gas giant. Putin used the company as an instrument of statecraft and an engine of corruption. Firtash bought gas from Gazprom at a steep discount. He marked it up threefold when he sold it to Ukraine, pocketing $3 billion and paying pro-Russian politicians, chiefly Yanukovych, to do the Kremlin's bidding. Through the oligarch's largesse, the president paid Manafort his millions.

The FBI had been a man's world—usually men of Irish or Italian heritage schooled by Jesuits and raised in a closed culture of police and priests.

George Piro, had gathered evidence that al-Qaeda had a network of adherents at American flight schools. Williams urged a nationwide investigation. He was unsurprised when headquarters took no action; thirteen years of experience had taught him that counterintelligence and counterterrorism were "bastard stepchildren" at the FBI.

The spectacle of the United States Army chasing the unarmed veterans, their wives, and their children out of the shadow of the Capitol was a scene of American urban combat without parallel since the Civil War.