Quotes from Tim Weiner

Where were the weapons of mass destruction? he asked. Did they exist at all? They did not, Saddam said. It had been a long-running bluff, a deception intended to keep the Iranians, the Israelis, and the Americans at bay. "We destroyed them. We told you," he told Piro on February 13, 2004. "By God, if I had such weapons, I would have used them in the fight against the United States." He was telling the truth. The

The FBI—not for the first time—had produced evidence that undermined a presidency. "No one was more shocked and angry than I," Bush wrote in his memoirs. "I had a sickening feeling every time I thought about it. I still do.

Kissinger would select suspects for surveillance. If Hoover concurred, the taps would go in. The responsibility for finding the leakers and stopping the leaks would rest entirely on the FBI. On

Some of Nixon's closest aides knew these taps fell into a twilight zone of the law. Nixon thought he had the power to spy on anyone he pleased on the grounds of national security. In 1968, Congress had passed a law saying the president could

The high command sent the order to kill Che at 11:50 a.m. "Guevara was executed with a burst of shots at 1:15 p.m.," Rodriguez radioed to Tilton. "Guevara's last words were: 'Tell my wife to remarry and tell Fidel Castro that the Revolution will rise again in the Americas.' To his executioner he said, 'Remember, you are killing a man.

The IRA studied Americans to understand what made them angry, to learn how to think and speak and write like them and, in the fullness of time, to spearhead a new kind of political warfare against the United States. "Our task," one of the Saint Petersburg trolls later told a Russian reporter, "was to set Americans against their own government: to provoke unrest and discontent." From the outset, the mission was to incite a civil war within the American political system.

authorize wiretaps to protect the United States from foreign spies and subversives. But the targets of these taps were not KGB agents. They were thirteen American government officials and four newspaper reporters. Over the next two years, though the leaks went on, the taps never revealed a shred of incriminating evidence against anyone. But they were the first step down the road to Watergate. On

As a report released by the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee put it, the Russians sought to "blur the lines between reality and fiction, erode our trust in media entities and the information environment, in government, in each other, and in democracy itself." It took years before Americans understood this.

Denial of such employment was spelled out to include anyone associated with communism, homosexuals, drunks, and other social aberrants who might be considered threats to the security of the USA. It was a nasty