A few years later, in 1979, Iranian revolutionaries seized the American embassy in Tehran. They captured a C.I.A. case officer named William Daugherty and accused him of running the agency’s entire while plotting to assassinate Ayatollah Khomeini. Daugherty, who had been in the C.I.A. for only nine months, tried to explain that he The Iranians seemed offended that the Americans would send such an inexperienced spy. It was “beyond insult,” Daugherty later recalled, “for that officer not to speak the language or know the customs, culture and history of their country.”
Evan Thomas remembers a Middle Eastern spy network without people didn’t even speak the native tongue, Persian,...." and failed to predict the Iranian revolution of 1979. The agency also did not foresee the explosion of an atom bomb by the Soviet Union in 1949, the invasion of South Korea in 1950, the popular uprisings in Eastern Europe in the 1950s, the installation of Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962, the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the explosion of an atom bomb by India in 1998 — the list goes on and on, culminating in the agency’s wrong call on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in 2002-3".
Evan Thomas says: <<Tim Weiner’s book is a litany of failure. ....Weiner, a reporter for The Times who has covered intelligence for many years, has a good eye for embarrassing detail. High-ranking officials, it appears, were often the last to know...When the Berlin Wall fell, Milt Bearden, the leader of the C.I.A.’s Soviet division, was reduced to watching CNN and deflecting urgent calls from White House officials who wanted to know what the agency’s spies were saying. “It was hard to confess that there were no Soviet spies worth a damn — they all had been rounded up and killed, and no one at the C.I.A. knew why,” Weiner writes. (The American agents in Moscow had been betrayed by the C.I.A. mole Aldrich Ames.)>>.
Evan Thomas' conclusions: "using tens of thousands of declassified documents and on-the-record recollections of dozens of chagrined spymasters, Weiner paints what may be the most disturbing picture yet of C.I.A. ineptitude. After following along Weiner’s march of folly, readers may wonder: Is an open democracy capable of building and sustaining an effective secret intelligence service? Maybe not. But with Islamic terrorists vowing to set off a nuclear device in an American city, there isn’t much choice but to keep on trying".