This book is a very in-depth analysis of the CIA's unclassified covert operations over the years. The problem is that the author takes a negative view of the whole thing and not in a way that implies that the CIA is doing something morally questionable, but from a viewpoint that they have failed basically every single mission that they undertook throughout their entire history. For example, the author claims the CIA failed in Guatemala because they rid the country of a communist government and an authoritarian regime took power and killed hundreds of thousands over its lifetime. This is not seen as a failure in the CIA's book as it got rid of the communist power that it wanted to get rid of, this is rather a failure on a moral level, something that the CIA is not paid to calculate. The book started to drag on and on when the author kept setting up the CIA to implode upon itself and collapse as an agency, but this never happened and Weiner never explained how the CIA had managed to pull itself back from the brink. Reading this book provides an overview of quite a few of the CIA's covert missions, demonstrating that America has had a hand in some of the worst regimes of Africa and South America as well as a hand in arming some of our enemies, such as bin Laden and Hussein. That is the reason that I am giving this book four stars as the book is obviously well researched and thorough. However, I have withheld a star on the grounds that you have to slog through the author's opinions in order to extract the devastating facts of the CIA's actions.