The CIA may not be thrilled with this conversation. Here, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and highly regarded CIA expert Tim Weiner reveals stunning details about the agency’s espionage and covert activities. Learn about the CIA’s greatest successes and failures, its best weapon, how China and Russia are spying on the U.S., and much more.
Chapter 1: What is the CIA's role and mission?
According to the CIA's website, the CIA is the world's premier foreign intelligence agency that collects and analyzes foreign intelligence and also conducts covert action for U.S. leaders. What is the CIA actually doing and how well are they doing at both foreign intelligence and covert action? Hi, everyone. I'm Lynn Thoman, and this is Three Takeaways.
On Three Takeaways, I talk with some of the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, newsmakers, and scientists. Each episode ends with three key takeaways to help us understand the world and maybe even ourselves a little better. Today, I'm excited to be with Tim Weiner. Tim is an American reporter and author.
He worked for The New York Times as a foreign correspondent in Mexico, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Sudan, as well as as a national security correspondent in Washington, D.C. He is also the author of five books and co-author of a sixth, and he is the winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.
His books include Legacy of Ashes, which is a history of the CIA, and Enemies, which is a history of the FBI. His upcoming book, which is titled The Mission, is going to be about the CIA. I'm excited to find out from Tim about both the CIA's espionage and its covert activities. Welcome, Tim, and thanks so much for joining Three Takeaways today.
Happy to be with you.
It is my pleasure. The CIA is such a storied organization. Its precursor, as everyone knows, was created by President Franklin Roosevelt during World War II. But let's talk about how the CIA has done more recently. What do you think the CIA's greatest recent successes are?
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Chapter 2: What are the CIA's recent successes?
Well, the greatest success was the CIA, through espionage, obtained Vladimir Putin's war plans for Ukraine in 2021. And rather than squirrel away that remarkable achievement, it decided to convince President Biden that it would be the best thing to tell the world about And both Biden and Secretary of State Tony Blinken did tell a disbelieving world that Russia would invade Ukraine imminently.
And they were right. Trying to understand the intentions and capabilities of America's enemies, trying to anticipate surprise, has always been among the highest missions of the CIA.
In the beginning, what President Truman wanted when the CIA was created in 1947 was a newspaper that was better than the New York Times and the Washington Post at informing him what was going on in the world, to know the secrets of the Kremlin, to understand what Stalin was, what he really wanted as he pressed westward throughout Europe and took more than 58% of European territory hostage.
Within a year, the mission changed. The Pentagon and the State Department wanted the CIA to conduct paramilitary activities, to fight fire with fire, and to try and roll the Russians back to their original borders and to liberate the captive nations of Eastern Europe, like Poland, Czechoslovakia, and perhaps Russia itself.
These led to a five-year flurry of paramilitary activities, which were suicide missions. Hundreds of people died. These missions stayed secret for many, many years. In the 21st century, CIA was called upon once again to become a paramilitary arm and then to become jailers and torturers. The CIA was not equipped to do that. But the CIA does what the president tells it to do.
This is a very important point that is lost on a lot of Americans. It was not the case, for example, that some CIA officers sat around drinking martinis one day and one of them said, hey, I've got a good idea. Let's overthrow Iran. Let's kill Fidel Castro. Presidents wanted those things to happen. The CIA was duty bound to salute smartly and do what the president said.
So the president asked the CIA to run the prisons in Iraq and lead the interrogation of prisoners?
George W. Bush did so, and he acknowledged that he did so in his memoir, Decision Points.
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Chapter 3: How did the CIA gather intelligence on Russia's plans?
And how did that impact the CIA?
I have interviewed quite a number of people who were involved in the secret prison system, the black sites, including the man who created them. They all knew that this would never stay secret, that it would come out one day, as it did rather rapidly, and that there would be hell to pay for it. But they didn't have a choice.
Intelligence is usually broken down into two parts, human intelligence and signals or digital intelligence. Was the theft of Putin's war plans by human intelligence or signals intelligence, or do we know?
The answer to that is yes and yes. The crucial part of that was human intelligence, was the recruitment of Russians who had some access and, in several cases, worked in the Kremlin.
So what is the CIA now doing versus Russia and China in terms of both human as well as signals intelligence?
Well, signals intelligence belongs almost entirely to the National Security Agency. That's their job. Since 2014, the CIA has been supporting Ukraine's military and intelligence services. And their intelligence support, primarily, has been a major factor in the survival of Ukraine since the Russian invasion. The United States is under attack by Russia and China and has been for at least a decade.
The Chinese intelligence services are massive players. The main Chinese intelligence directorate, the Ministry of State Security, has probably 400,000 officers and analysts, the CIA a little more than 20,000. The Chinese, through digital warfare, have penetrated the government of the United States and indeed the civilian computer telecommunications and data systems of the United States.
to an extent few Americans realize. In 2014, for example, Chinese intelligence penetrated the Federal Office of Personnel Management and stole the personnel files of every one of the 22 million Americans who worked for the government of the United States, including the security files of everyone who worked in the CIA.
Those files included their true names, passport information, in some cases, biometric data, The Chinese took this purloined information, cross-indexed it with passport and biometric data stolen from the nation's international airports, and developed profiles of most, if not all, CIA covert operations officers working abroad. It is extremely hard to spy on China when you're on the ground.
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Chapter 4: What challenges does the CIA face against China and Russia?
We know that Israel was blindsided by the attacks of October 7th. Was the U.S. as well? Was that also, in your opinion, a U.S. intelligence failure? And why did we fail?
It was an Israeli intelligence failure and a massive one. The United States and the CIA in particular rely on liaison with foreign intelligence services. You know, the clandestine service of the Central Intelligence Agency, the spies. This is not a massive army. It's somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 people.
The CIA cannot function without liaison with friendly foreign intelligence services and some that are not so friendly. Warning of this attack on October 7th by Hamas was there, but it was ignored. It must be remembered that Benjamin Netanyahu was covertly financing Hamas as a way of undermining the Palestinian Authority. Very often what we call intelligence failures are also political failures.
It's not enough to ring the alarm. You have to make sure your leaders hear it. And leaders rarely want to hear bad news.
Do we know what the CIA is doing in terms of intelligence and covert activity in other hotspots such as Lebanon, Syria and Yemen?
Well, the CIA stations in Damascus and in Beirut and in Israel and in Jordan in particular, the Jordanian intelligence services and the CIA have a long and extremely close relationship. They are primarily listening, learning, trying to map the battlefield. There are few, if any, covert actions that the CIA could undertake that could change the current history of the Middle East.
And the primary mission right now is to figure out what in the world is going on, which, of course, was the original mission of the CIA at its creation.
In your opinion, how is the CIA done with respect to China?
The CIA suffered a catastrophic loss in roughly 2013. It had remarkably recruited a network of about 30 recruited foreign agents in China, Chinese people, who had access to the political leadership, the intelligence services, and the military. And then that network, which had been developed over the course of a decade or more,
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Chapter 5: How does the CIA conduct cyber warfare?
He came to power, his son and successor, and the Jordanian intelligence service exists and holds power and authority with the steadfast support and financial assistance of the CIA. You could say the same for 20 different foreign intelligence services all over the world in places you wouldn't normally think of as being American allies. Uzbekistan, for example.
The CIA simply doesn't have the number of people and foreign language skills and the reach to be a global intelligence service by itself. And so the financing of friendly and often not so friendly foreign intelligence services is a really big part of what the CIA does. Its liaisons with them are one of the most important, if not the most important, ways of gathering intelligence around the world.
There have been operations that stayed secret for many years. For example, the head of Hezbollah military wing, the man named Imad Mugniyev, His operations against the United States go back to the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1982, in which some 240 American soldiers and sailors were murdered. He kidnapped the CIA station chief in Beirut, William Buckley, who died in captivity.
Meunier went on to lead, for example, the bombings as far afield as Buenos Aires against Israeli and Jewish targets. By the early 20th century, Hezbollah with Iranian support was really the most powerful army in the Middle East. In 2008, the head of the Mossad came to the CIA director, General Mike Hayden, with a plan to assassinate him. The CIA built a bomb.
The bomb was installed on the rear mounted spare tire of the target's Mitsubishi SUV. And in the streets of Damascus, in one of the most heavily guarded neighborhoods in the country, not far from the Syrian intelligence service headquarters, in 2008, Mugabe was blown into smithereens. The CIA was directly involved in that.
And that operation stayed secret for seven years until the press pieced it together.
Tim, what are the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with today?
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Chapter 6: What were the intelligence failures surrounding the October 7th attacks?
The CIA has been around since 1947. It operates as part of the American government and operates under law. Now, overseas, it gleefully and sometimes very skillfully breaks the laws of foreign countries, espionage and illegal everywhere. Over the decades, presidents have ordered the CIA to do some very, very illegal things.
A reckless president can make the CIA not an intelligence service under law, but a secret weapon wielded by men above it. A second thing I think people should know is that CIA support for Ukraine has been essential to that country's survival.
if american military and intelligence support to ukraine is diminished or eliminated in the near future putin will take ukraine and he will not stop there the third thing that i think is important for people to think about when it comes to american national security is that from the end of world war ii until the beginning of the 21st century
The number of countries in the world who were democracies slowly grew and grew and grew and grew. And that growth escalated after the end of the Cold War. And by the turn of the century, the number of democracies and autocracies in the world were roughly equal. And that had never happened before in the history of civilization.
Ever since then, the number of democracies in the world has flatlined and declined. Autocracies on the rise. We cannot encourage democracy in the world if we ourselves do not live up to democracy.
Thank you, Tim. I enjoyed your books, especially your histories of the CIA and the FBI. And I'm looking forward to your upcoming book, The Mission on the CIA.
Thanks very much.
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Chapter 7: What covert operations is the CIA involved in today?
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I'm Lynn Toman, and this is Three Takeaways. Thanks for listening.