True story

Provocative, highly instructive and extremely interesting, Pulitzer Prize winner Tim Weiner's book explores the 60-year history of the CIA. The study was based on thousands of archival documents, interviews with current agents, veterans and former leaders of the main American spy agency. The author describes without embellishment the CIA's military operations in Cuba, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and many other countries. It tells the story of management mistakes within the department, the thoughtless dissipation of a colossal budget and how the CIA's miscalculations affected the state of US national security, which resulted in the tragedy of September 11, 2001. Warns of a dangerous inability to see the world as it is, which is unacceptable given the threat of global terrorism.