Rarely does one hear a discussion of the CIA, its fraught history, and its current challenges that’s altogether clear-headed, very well informed and devoid of cant or prepackaged partisanship. But the other day a U.K. foreign affairs platform called Decision One pulled it off in great style with the estimable Tim Weiner, who after a pretty spectacular career at the New York Times has become a leading historian of CIA operations, and Sir Richard Dearlove, a former head of Britain’s MI6. The very adroit moderator, Rosanna Lockwood, is a British television journalist and international news presenter known for anchoring prime-time programs across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.
You can watch the lively video of it on YouTube, but I rather enjoyed reading and digesting extensive excerpts of the insightful remarks of Weiner, Dearlove and Lockwood on the transcript (helpfully curated and supplied by Hvylya.net, a Ukrainian-language news and analytical platform that can be rendered in English via Chrome).
This is very good stuff. I have only very rarely cross-posted a piece from elsewhere, but I’m doing it with this discussion because of its unusual quality, not to mention its value in helping a larger audience understand our current challenges, particularly during the Trump purges of the I.C. amid the wars in Ukraine and now Iran. And if I can very find a way to ask reprint permission from both sites— I made a very good faith search to contact management—I will certainly grovel, and pay, if need be.
In any event, on with the show. Or you can start reading excerpts, like I did, here:
Cuba: The Cheap Oil Has Run Out
Rosanna Lockwood: The CIA is setting up a secret Cuba task force as President Trump puts more pressure on Havana. It will let the agency quickly direct more financial, human and technical resources at Cuba, to find the fissures in the regime and widen them. The last CIA Cuba task force gave us the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. What does it tell us that they are setting this one up now?Eastern Europeans.
Sir Richard Dearlove: They are living in the expectation that the regime is going to founder and that there will be a new government of some sort in Cuba. It may still be highly nationalistic, but it will be better disposed to the United States, and it certainly will not be operating in that geopolitical theatre at the behest of either Russia or China. This is a huge issue historically for the United States, going back to the Cuba crisis of 1962-63. The signs of crumbling are already there, and the problems are economic: no more cheap oil from Venezuela, no alternative source of supply, and the energy running out. We know about the resilience of the Cuban people, but the situation is parlous, and the CIA will be doing everything it can to detach political figures from loyalty to the regime. This may take a year to play out, but I doubt it will take longer.
Rosanna Lockwood: Could that mandate change if Trump’s patience erodes as he approaches the midterms in November?
Sir Richard Dearlove: Not really. Look at what happened in Venezuela: they removed Maduro but stuck with the regime and then tried to change it economically. I would expect the same in Cuba, and it would not be military. There will be Cuban politicians and members of the elite working out how to personally reinsure with the United States and be part of the story if the government begins to shift. This is very much the sort of situation which a sophisticated intelligence service should be able to exploit readily.
China’s New Embassy on the Edge of the City of London
Rosanna Lockwood: Then there is the plan for a gigantic Chinese embassy in central London, on the site of the Royal Mint. The objection is not about the look or the size of the building on this 5.4-acre site, but about what a Chinese embassy there represents. Luke de Pulford, who runs the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, says that if they expect us to roll over and let our own capital become a Chinese Communist Party power centre, they have completely misjudged the strength of the opposition.Journalism & News Industry
Sir Richard Dearlove: The Royal Mint is just beyond the Tower of London. It is a huge, empty, prestigious venue, and it will let them put a massive community inside the compound, with a lot of residential property. There have been worries about communications cables carrying very sensitive material running close to the site, or through it. The neighbours appealed against the redevelopment, and the news is that the appeal failed. There is also an element of reciprocity, because the British embassy in Beijing needs rebuilding, and that was not going to happen without concessions. I find the symbolism worrying and the scale worrying, because the place will become a sort of European centre for Chinese representation. The question is how many intelligence officers are going to be in there, how many people planning mischief who will not necessarily just be in the UK, but will be moving off, travelling through Europe and other places.
Rosanna Lockwood: Nobody is arguing that there should not be a Chinese embassy in London. That is how this game works.
Sir Richard Dearlove: The Chinese missions are pretty well housed across London as it is. They argue that they want to consolidate onto one site, but there is no strong case for letting them move. And we are not an autocracy: we have the rule of law, and the rule of law operates in a case like this. If it had been thought a bad idea at the time, they should have blocked the sale to a foreign government. The site came on the market when it was all far less controversial, the Chinese government bought it, and once they owned it the project became very difficult to stop. The other thing, which has affected the United States as well, is the creation of unofficial Chinese police stations across this country, which are there to observe the behaviour of the Chinese community here and to make sure that Chinese students at British universities are not indoctrinated in a way prejudicial to the leadership of the Communist Party.
Putin Will Test NATO, but Not With Tanks
Rosanna Lockwood: US intelligence now assesses that Putin could test NATO’s resolve with a limited incursion, and the assessment comes amid a shortfall in certain critical munitions. To my mind there is nothing new here. Russia is obsessed with NATO and would love to work out how to separate the United States from its allies, and we have already been seeing all sorts of projectiles and missiles landing in Poland and Romania, whether intentionally or not. To my mind they will try to test this while Trump is still leading the United States, because his cynicism about NATO has been well noted. Does any of it surprise you?
Sir Richard Dearlove: Not particularly. The American comment was a little misleading, because it seemed to imply a formal military incursion into one of the Baltic states. I do not think that is going to happen, and nothing is likely to happen that would trigger Article 5. What you will get, and what you are getting already, are the incidents you describe: drone incursions, missiles landing in Poland, quote unquote accidentally. One can expect more provocative grey war incidents of greater seriousness. We are not talking about a conventional military attack. Putin’s purpose will be to see what sort of reaction he gets, not just from the individual country but from NATO as a whole. And as the war in Ukraine generally goes less well for Russia, the risk of these incidents probably increases.
Writing About the CIA While the CIA Is Being Purged
Rosanna Lockwood: Tim, how hard is it to write a book about the CIA, and has it become harder now?Executive Branch
Tim Weiner: It would be very hard today. Under the present administration there has been an ideological purge at the CIA, as well as at the FBI and at State. You cannot be promoted, you cannot rise to power, unless you answer three questions correctly in the view of the Trump administration. Who won the 2020 election? What did you think of the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol? And who did you vote for in 2024? I do not mean to compare the two regimes invidiously, but in Pol Pot’s Cambodia people were purged because they wore glasses. In Donald Trump’s America, people are being purged because they can see things as they are.
Tim Weiner: Writing Legacy of Ashes was quite different. There you had a rich trove of declassified documents covering most of the Cold War. In 1991 the then director of the CIA, Bob Gates, later US secretary of defense, said we are going to declassify our Cold War history, warts and all. It took more than a decade for the pig to go through the python, but it did, and by the early aughts I had about eight bankers boxes of them. Then, working on an actuarial basis, I interviewed the oldest of the old boys and worked my way forward. For the 21st century there are no declassified documents to speak of. That process has broken down, so The Mission rests almost entirely on interviews.
Sir Richard Dearlove: Tim, can I interject straight away. The Mission is a much more interesting and better informed book than Legacy of Ashes, and you will certainly be aware that I was pretty critical of Legacy of Ashes. A lot of the CIA’s success during the Cold War was simply not in the material Bob Gates released, and some of it is not in the public domain even today. So I felt there was an unfairness, and that the CIA had a much better Cold War than you painted. I did agree with the basic theory of the book, about the distractions of covert action and what they did to the agency’s reputation. With hindsight, do you agree that The Mission is a more accurate book? I am not saying a better one.
Tim Weiner: The fundamental difference is that there is more humanity in The Mission, because there are more voices from the living, as opposed to the dry documentation of the dead.
Betrayal and Trust: The DNA of Intelligence Work
Tim Weiner: There is a long interview in the book with the then sitting director of the clandestine service, Tom Sylvester, and he speaks about the morality of espionage. The operations officer is entering into a criminal conspiracy with his recruited foreign agent to commit treason against that man’s tribe, his country, his party. And yet the bond is a covenant, not unlike marriage, and it depends on trust. This double helix, if you will, of betrayal and trust is the DNA of intelligence work.
Sir Richard Dearlove: I could not agree with you more. I got into terrible trouble after my retirement with le Carré, because I said he had flipped the coin of espionage and made its currency betrayal, whereas its currency was actually trust.
Tim Weiner: Both things are true, and I can see how you get into a tussle with John le Carré, because he certainly does emphasise the betrayals. I can also see why you found some of Legacy of Ashes distasteful: the documentary record emphasised covert action, and like the drunk looking for his keys underneath the lamplight, that is where I found the greater part of my information. But the CIA does not dream up its own missions. It is not as if a bunch of officers were sitting around in Miami in 1960 on the second or third martini and one of them said, let us go kill Fidel Castro. It was Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy who wanted that. In the first 25 years of the Cold War the agency was largely driven by taskings from presidents, secretaries of defense and secretaries of state: do something, change the world. The mission was twofold: to know the world through espionage and analysis, and to change the world through covert action. The tail wagged the dog more often than not, and you cannot change the world without understanding it.
A Burning Platform Before 9/11
Tim Weiner: In the months and years before the 9/11 attacks, the CIA was, in the words of its director at the time George Tenet, a burning platform. Imagine an oil rig in the North Sea on a stormy night, and the rig is on fire. Talent had drained away after the fall of the Soviet Union: in 1995 the agency admitted 25 people through its school for spies. Who wanted to work in the world of secrets in the mid-1990s, when the world of information was exploding and Google was a startup? Tenet said the system was blinking red, and he was trying to shout from the rooftops to President Bush and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld that something terrible was about to happen. They were not listening, because the administration’s trust in the agency was diminished. Sir Richard, perhaps 36 hours after the attacks you and your colleagues flew through closed airspace into Washington and met at CIA headquarters. I have always wanted to ask whether you sensed that the US was going to go to war not only against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, but into Iraq.
Sir Richard Dearlove: It was clear there was a wish in the Bush administration to ascribe 9/11 to a linkage with Saddam Hussein. We in the UK violently disagreed. At a briefing in the White House with the president I challenged the CIA briefer and said he was talking nonsense, that there was absolutely no linkage, and that I could say authoritatively we knew there was not one. I do not want to go into detail as to how we knew. What is also highly relevant is that in June there had been an intelligence summit in Bermuda, organised by the Brits, to exchange what we had on a coming catastrophic attack. But we did not know the time or the place. So the dreadful thing is that when 9/11 happened, it was not a surprise. It was that the jigsaw had not been put together, and there certainly was not a picture of the jigsaw on the lid of the box.
Sir Richard Dearlove: Most of the intelligence was littered around the United States, particularly in regional FBI offices that had failed to coordinate with the CIA. All the more extraordinary because in 1993, I think, when Ramzi Yousef tried to blow up the Twin Towers, I had been briefed on it in detail by the Bureau. Back in London I opened a meeting of all the seniors in intelligence and defence with this: imagine what the situation would now be like if Ramzi Yousef’s surrogates had put the bomb in the right place in the parking of the Twin Towers, because what they were trying to do was to sever the structural pillars and collapse one tower down into the other. So when the 9/11 Commission said it was not a failure of intelligence but a failure of imagination, that rather struck home. After the event, if you put it all together, the intelligence and the targeting were all available. Not unlike Pearl Harbor. Scattered, but available. And one felt a huge sense of inadequacy that we had not stopped this thing happening.
Tim Weiner: Let us remember that the CIA was created not to fight the Cold War, which came later. It was created to prevent a second Pearl Harbor. That was its original remit.
Intelligence Failures Are Usually Policy Failures
Rosanna Lockwood: Intelligence has to be done covertly, and journalists try to hold truth to power. In investigating the agencies, do you undermine the foundations of the myth around them?
Tim Weiner: We have a slightly different set-up here in the United States. We do not have an Official Secrets Act. You cannot get a D-notice around here. Not yet, anyway. I get along quite well with intelligence officers and analysts, because we are essentially in the same business. We want to know secrets. We want to divine mysteries. And both of us can parachute into a foreign country and say, take me to your leader, and often as not you will be taken. Covering the CIA has been like covering a foreign country: you have to learn the customs of the tribe, the lingo, the history and the culture.
“It was clear there was a wish in the Bush administration to ascribe 9/11 to a linkage with Saddam Hussein. We in the UK violently disagreed. At a briefing in the White House with the president I challenged the CIA briefer and said he was talking nonsense, that there was absolutely no linkage, and that I could say authoritatively we knew there was not one.”—Richard Dearlove
Tim Weiner: I will never forget the first time I went to headquarters. It was 1987, I had just turned 31, and I was on my way to Afghanistan to write about the gigantic covert operation the CIA was running there. Congress, in its wisdom, had decided to introduce the Stinger anti-aircraft missile, an American weapon, into the battle. Deniability be damned: until then we had supplied the Mujahideen with Soviet bloc weapons, and this was going to be the first time in the history of the Cold War that American weapons were used to kill Soviets. I called the public information office and asked for one of the country briefings they gave reporters heading somewhere strange. Peter Earnest said absolutely not and hung up on me. So off I went, backpacked with the Mujahideen and saw a Stinger fired in anger. Three months later I had been back at my desk in Washington for barely a day when the phone rang. It was my new best friend from the CIA. How would you like to come in for that briefing now? So off I went, and I walked into the lobby of the cathedral that Allen Dulles had built to himself, and there on the wall is the Gospel of John engraved, John 8:32: and ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free. I was hooked. Who would not be? That inscription must be read uncynically. You cannot look at it and say, here is an organisation devoted to deception and they are talking about the truth. No. The mission is to know what is going on in the world in the hope that the United States can form a coherent foreign policy as it faces the dangers that surround it. And that mission is very much endangered today.
Sir Richard Dearlove: Tim, I am alarmed when I hear you say that, because you and I agree that the fundamental role of an intelligence service is to create the information flow which makes good policy. But the division between collecting intelligence and making policy is much more respected in the British system than in the American one. You are not a policymaker if you are the head of MI6. You might be asked your opinion, but you are not inclined to give it. To be fair to George Tenet, he understood that difference absolutely as well. The one thing I would say in the CIA’s favour is that over time it has had some really significant successes and some really good case officers, and I sometimes feel that in your books you are so keen to present the warts that those successes do not carry the same weight as your critique. And a lot of your critique is fair. I am not disagreeing with it.
Tim Weiner: Here I would cite General Michael Hayden, who ran the CIA from 2006 to 2009 and before that the National Security Agency, our equivalent of GCHQ. President Kennedy told the CIA after the Bay of Pigs that your failures are trumpeted and your successes are unheralded. Hayden said, well, of course, if they go heralded they are not successes. They must stay covert. Winkling the successes out after the fact is a formidable task, and I recognise the problem. Will you grant me that there are striking successes heralded in The Mission? And would you agree that what people often call intelligence failures are in fact policy failures, and that the policymakers are directing policy without heed to the intelligence?
Sir Richard Dearlove: I absolutely agree, because in my book intelligence failure is a very misleading phrase. Most intelligence requirements are so tough to fulfil that you are in a permanent state of failure unless you have a success. To penetrate Xi Jinping’s immediate entourage of advisers, so that you know what is going on in his head about China’s plans for Taiwan, is a very tough requirement.
Tim Weiner: That goes to one of the great successes, and latterly one of the great failures, of the CIA in the 21st century, which is penetrating the Chinese Politburo and the Ministry of State Security.
Sir Richard Dearlove: Those are fundamental requirements for British intelligence as well, and they are the areas where services with particularly close relationships talk to each other about the most sensitive operations, even though the material is normally no foreign or UK eyes only. I think the CIA historically, despite all the problems, is not bad at all in the premier division of espionage.
Unpack Your Bags: What Backing Kyiv Cost the CIA
Rosanna Lockwood: Let us get to the modern-day CIA. As we record, the front page of the Financial Times says Trump is dismantling US democratic guardrails, according to former CIA officials now going on the record. How easy is it to get a sense of the mood inside the agency as it pertains to the president and to their work?
Tim Weiner: The week after The Mission was published in the United States in July of 2025, Tom Sylvester, who had been chief of the clandestine service, was summoned to the seventh-floor director’s suite by John Ratcliffe. Sylvester had spoken to me on the record and at length, with particular emphasis on CIA support for Ukraine going back to the 2014 Russian attack which seized the Crimean Peninsula and parts of eastern Ukraine. He was quite explicit about the enormity of what that support meant to the United States, to Europe and of course to the Ukrainian people. As chiefs of the clandestine service have been since at least the 1950s, Tom was slated for a final posting, and the final posting for that job is chief of station in London. Ratcliffe told him to unpack his bags. His career was over because he had spoken to me about his full-throated support for Ukraine. The man initially slated to replace him, Ralph Goff, six times a station chief, was keelhauled for the same reason. This set a tone, which is that if you are athwart of what the president’s impulse is at the moment, and his impulse is generally to screw Ukraine and to parrot the talking points of Vladimir Putin, you are screwed.
Tim Weiner: At that point Ratcliffe was pulling hundreds of officers and analysts away from Russia and Ukraine and pointing them at Latin America, because the president, along with the secretary of defense, had decided to mount an intelligence-based campaign to blow up suspected drug boats in the Caribbean, which he said falsely were ferrying fentanyl from Venezuela to the United States. That was codswallop, utter nonsense. And since then the new chief of the clandestine service, whom I will not name, has been roped into the war crime of blowing civilian boats out of the water and killing more than 200 people to date, most of whom are not known to be drug smugglers. It is a violation of the law of war to deliberately kill civilians. None of this is ennobling.
“Tom [Sylvester] was slated for a final posting, and the final posting for that job is chief of station in London. Ratcliffe told him to unpack his bags. His career was over because he had spoken to me about his full-throated support for Ukraine.”
Tim Weiner: And let us speak of the successes that have been wrought. The president tells you that you are to kidnap the despicable and despotic leader of Venezuela on a charge that he is a drug kingpin. The CIA forthwith helps carry out that mission, providing the intelligence that allowed US commandos to kidnap Maduro and in the process kill about three dozen of his Cuban security team. A striking tactical success in the service of the strategic goal of empire, because the target here was not Venezuela, it was Cuba: cut off Venezuela’s oil to Cuba and strangle the Cuban regime. You are then ordered to help pinpoint the supreme leader of Iran so that he may be killed by American and Israeli bombs. Tactical success in the service of strategic disaster. The fundamental problem for intelligence in Trump’s second administration is that intelligence means nothing to Donald Trump. When he uses the word, he puts it in scare quotes. He cannot be briefed. His mind is made up and he does not want to be confused with facts. What is the role of an intelligence service in an open American democracy when the president does not heed it?
Sir Richard Dearlove: Tim, can I interrupt at this point. I agree with pretty much everything you have said, and Ukraine is an extremely painful issue when it comes to this administration’s attitude. My but is purely an observation. Many of us fundamentally disagree with this administration on policy, but the misfortune is that they are the elected government of the United States, and they are instructing the CIA to carry out that policy. The human rights issue you raise about attacking so-called drug fentanyl boats is crucial, because we have been around this circuit before, in the war on terror, with black sites and interrogations and the other things the CIA was encouraged to do and hid from its British allies, knowing how heavily we would have disagreed. In a way we are going through another cycle. Go back to 1939 and 1940, when you have a very reluctant American government that does not want to go to war with Germany while that catastrophe is falling on Europe. It almost plays out as an exact historical parallel.Executive Branch
Tim Weiner: Yes, and British intelligence very cannily tried to work the United States closer to entering the war.
Sir Richard Dearlove: It did, through the New York station, which we all know about historically. I wish we could do the same with the Trump administration now over Ukraine.
Tim Weiner: So do many Americans.
Fired by the Hundreds, and the Attack Still to Come
Rosanna Lockwood: If the rank and file are being purged unless they engage in the right type of groupthink, there must be people left who think differently. Do they just stay quiet? Talk to us about the damage being done in the long run, and how quickly it could be repaired under a different administration.
Tim Weiner: Among the first things Ratcliffe did, on orders from the White House, was to fire everyone the CIA had hired in the last two years of the Biden administration. Hundreds and hundreds of people trained at the school for spies, a plurality of whom were to join the China mission centre, were kicked to the curb because of when they were hired. Then Ratcliffe, in his wisdom, sent the true first names and true first initials of all these people through an unclassified email to Donald Trump and Elon Musk, then at the White House, to say, look what I did, boss. I guarantee you the Chinese can read the unclassified email systems of the White House and have done so for years. The counterintelligence dangers of those two acts I do not need to spell out to you.
Tim Weiner: Add the ideological purge, which is that you had to be MAGA to be promoted to command rank, and you get an exodus of talented operations officers and analysts. Pity the poor analysts: if their work does not conform to the president’s preconceptions, it is rubbished. And pity the operators trying to recruit foreign agents in some of the world’s most dangerous places, because the word of the United States is no longer the coin of the realm. Would you put your life on the line for this administration, if you were an Iranian or a Russian or a Chinese who wants to fundamentally change the world around you? I posit that you would not. At the FBI the director, the party animal Kash Patel, has similarly purged scores of agents because they worked on the counterintelligence case involving Trump and Putin, or because they were involved in the seizure of the bankers boxes of highly classified documents the president took with him to Mar-a-Lago after he was defeated.Eastern Europeans
Tim Weiner: I posit to you that the cumulative effects of these purges leave the United States in a state of danger that approaches the months leading up to the 9/11 attacks 25 years ago. Trump has also destroyed the cybersecurity offices and architectures that were set up after the Russians attacked our election and our democracy to help elect him in 2016. And the United States, with its Israeli allies, has created a state of general conflagration in the Middle East. The next attack will not look like the last one. It may be silent. It may be unseen. But it is coming.
Sir Richard Dearlove: I find your assessment terrifying, but it gets back to a fundamental point. The core issue is trust. If you are recruiting highly placed human sources with access, trust is your currency, because you have to give the source a lifelong guarantee of anonymity. In the UK we go further: the guarantee is permanent, because the archives of MI6 are never released. From what you are saying, it seems the citadel of intelligence trust which has been so important to the United States is being destroyed or diminished. That seems to be your theory.
Tim Weiner: I am afraid so.
Sir Richard Dearlove: That is a pretty depressing note.
Tim Weiner: We are not here to enforce happiness, Sir Richard.
Sir Richard Dearlove: I know we are not, but I like a touch of optimism about the direction we are going in. Trump’s currency will run out at some point. The question, for you in particular, is how quickly the systems we are familiar with, which have played such important roles and which admittedly failed us at times, can be reconstructed and rebuilt.
Tim Weiner: Yes, but it will take a very long time, and trust once broken is not easily restored. Trump has broken trust with allies throughout NATO and beyond. That trust can be restored, but it will be difficult, and it will be equally difficult to replace the experience and expertise of the people who have fled or been keelhauled. The State Department, I would add, is a ghost ship. Of the close to 200 countries where the US has embassies, more than 80 of the ambassadorships are vacant, and American diplomacy is being conducted by the president’s shady son-in-law and a cryptocurrency hustler, who are cutting side deals for great profit as they project American power around the world. The Foreign Service is in trouble. The clandestine service is in trouble. The FBI is in trouble. And the former Fox News host who is running the Pentagon has purged everyone who is not a straight-up MAGA white man from the command ranks of the American military. The zeal of Christian nationalism that he and the president have injected into the body politic of American national security is toxic.
Tim Weiner: King James I would appreciate this: the president is the body politic, it resides within him. The divine right of kings. Trump has an element of it running through him, although he himself is a godless man. How long the poison running through the bloodstream will persist once the administration is gone, I cannot tell you. The CIA’s crystal ball is better than mine on many a matter.
Trump’s Paradoxical Legacy and the Long Repair
Rosanna Lockwood: Does this open a conversation, if the United States gets to a very different administration next, about changing the system itself? Not that the British do it best, but towards one where the commander in chief does not get to dictate the policy of the intelligence agencies, where there is more of a separation of church and state. That seems the safer route to me.Executive Branch
Sir Richard Dearlove: I think the president is an aberration.
Tim Weiner: Well put, Sir Richard. I have a profound trust in the civic strength of America over time. That is where I come down.
Sir Richard Dearlove: I have one last comment for Tim, and it is bizarre in a way, but one has to think about it. If Trump’s legacy is that he disposed of the regime in Cuba, disposed of the regime in Venezuela and disposed of the regime in Iran, in favour of something more amenable to the West in those three crucial countries, this would be a legacy unmatched by any recent president in foreign policy. That is the confusing thought in my mind.
Tim Weiner: Sir Richard, those are three big ifs. The regime in Venezuela has not changed. Maduro is gone, but the regime by and large remains in place. The Cuban regime is tremendously resilient, and nothing short of an American military invasion will supplant it. They may evolve if the United States decides to give them a whole bunch of carrots as opposed to the big stick. And the regime in Iran, six months later, seems to me more hardline than it was before the attack. As for the fallacy that air power can create political change, let us say the Americans have a touching faith in that particular fantasy.
Tim Weiner: Let me end on a note of hope. We Americans are quite new at this. The Chinese have been in the business of intelligence since Sun Tzu wrote The Art of War 26 centuries ago, the British since Queen Elizabeth I, the Russians since Peter the Great. We have only been at it since 1947. We will get through this, I submit, but it will take years to repair the damage Trump has wrought. He has swung a wrecking ball through the architectures of American intelligence and national security that were built after the Second World War to protect the United States and its allies against the Russians and their allies. Americans do not yet grasp, in the way the British do, the uses of intelligence to inform foreign policy, because they have seen too little good flow from our services, and perhaps I will take a small measure of blame for that. They have also seen attacks on our civil liberties over the decades. The stain that will not out is the use of torture and secret prisons in the name of American national security. And yet we do still stand for something, and it is written in our Declaration of Independence: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We will regain those ideals in time.
Rosanna Lockwood: We always ask our guests what one decision they are looking out for. What are you watching for on American intelligence in the coming months or years?
Tim Weiner: The restoration of sanity in our political discourse, and the wheels coming off the juggernaut that is Donald Trump’s make America great again campaign.
What Dearlove Says Weiner Cannot See
Rosanna Lockwood: Sir Richard, in your 2007 Financial Times review of Legacy of Ashes you wrote about its polemic, its fundamentalist style of argument and its uncompromising bias. You read The Mission rather differently.
Sir Richard Dearlove: What got me about the first book is that it was really a hatchet job based on the consequences of failed covert action missions, which, as he explained, were imposed on the agency, because the presidents who used the CIA used its covert action capability to get around Congress on foreign policy that would have been condemned on the Hill. And there is an awful lot about the Cold War he did not know when he wrote it, because the rules in the CIA about discussing operations outside the public domain are draconian and his interlocutors simply did not inform him. So the book comes out as a distortion, although it is still a very interesting one historically. His point about The Mission is spot on: there is much more humanity in it, because it is based on talking to a succession of very talented and thoughtful CIA operatives, some of whom I know, who were put in a very difficult position in the war on terror, when a lot of what was done was on the borders of legality.Journalism & News Industry
Sir Richard Dearlove: What Tim says about the current state of the national security community is pretty scary stuff. What he did not talk about, because we did not give him the opportunity, is that this is by no means the whole story, because you have to add the massive capability that exists in the National Security Agency and overhead, in satellite technology. We know from published evidence that Zelensky would be having a much, much tougher time in Ukraine if the intelligence feed from Wiesbaden in Germany dried up. So we are still getting from Tim what I would describe as a partial view, because the overall machine which represents American national security is massive, sophisticated, highly technical and human, and he covers just a section of it. We should have a sense of proportionality about that discussion, which I found in his conclusions pretty depressing.
Rosanna Lockwood: Is there a point in anybody outside the intelligence community trying to write about it at this length, when there is always going to be that omission, always going to be a failure to have all the facts?
Sir Richard Dearlove: It is a partial account, but it is a pretty extraordinary one. When I read the chronology of what happened around the time of 9/11 and afterwards, bearing in mind I was involved in that day-to-day business, there is a lot in there that I did not know. The Americans would never have discussed it with a foreign service, even with the Brits, so it comes out after the event. In that sense the book is revelatory, and for anyone who wants a better insight into those events it is certainly worth reading. But I would not take it as the only source and interpretation. People should come and talk to me as well. I mean that as a bit of a joke, but it is probably pretty clear, listening to him, that he and I share a huge amount of common knowledge, some of which I probably know better than him, but I cannot talk about it. ###
I believe the Agency was penetrated by at least three moles before Aldrich Ames started spying for the KGB: James Angleton’s confidant, mentor, and mole-hunting superior in the Office of Security, Soviet Russia Division Reports & Requirements officer Leonard V. McCoy, and “CIA’s greatest agent handler,” Russia-born George Kisevalter. One of the things they all had in common was that they defended false defector-in-place in Geneva in June 1962 / false (or perhaps rogue) physical defector to the U.S. in February 1964, putative KGB staff officer Yuri Nosenko.