Long, exhausting, and, frankly disheartening book charting the myriad catastrophes and occasional triumphs of the CIA. From its origins in the OSS, whose romantic gung-ho legacy it completely failed to shake off, to its colossal betrayal of everything it should have stood for in the creation of the case for the Iraq war, the CIA seems to have mostly succeeded in spending lots of money, killing lots of its own agents, overstating the threat of Soviet communism and reacting with horrible blunders or equally horrible successes that either became self-fulfilling prophecies or worse for the people involved than any communist regime. It also failed as at espionage but everybody, including a succession of presidents, loved the covert action stuff, even though it generally made everything worse. Oversight was a joke, and so was their intelligence. Scandals and leaks and murders and corruption and cover-up and betrayals and finally a terrible eagerness to please and tell the president only what he wants to hear.

Highly readable, packed with various colossal giants of history, this sticks closely to the CIA view of things, so as a history of the various events it gets caught up in - Bay Of Pigs, Vietnam, Iran-Contra, it's necessarily incomplete, leading to a certain amount of whiplash and a longing for closure. Anyway, the CIA: it sucks, and this book shows how much damage a powerful secret institution in thrall to romantic methods and ideas that were born, had their heyday and died in WWII, can really do as it careens out of control down through the century.