CIA and the Culture of Failure

The 9/11 attacks and the war in Iraq sprang from massive intelligence failures. But while that idea is well understood, just how the CIA got to the point where it could fail so catastrophically is not.In large part, says John Diamond, this is because the typical pattern in U.S. national security is for a major failure to be studied and investigated in isolation. And, unfortunately, such probes tend to miss the links between intelligence failure in one arena and national security challenges in another: links that we need to look at if we are to understand failures of significant magnitude.To help us understand how and why such failures occur, Diamond analyzes key events from the end of the Cold War - when the CIA's main mission of spying on the Soviet Union ceased to exist - to 9/11 and the war in Iraq. By putting the failures surrounding these events in historical perspective, he demonstrates powerfully the linkages between lower-profile intelligence controversies of the early post-Cold War period and the high-profile failures whose consequences we live with today.Diamond's account takes the reader through a string of intelligence failures - from the Soviet collapse, through the Persian GulfWar, the failure to take on al-Qaeda after the 1998 terrorist attacks on U. S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and up to the critical failure to see that the US/UN containment policy towards Iraq had succeeded. The book shows how the CIA chronically overcorrected to its real or perceived mistakes - and how increasing politicization of intelligence left the Agency isolated and without allies as its budget declined and its response to emerging post-Cold War threats lagged.