by Tim Weiner.

Doubleday. 702 pages. $27.95.

BY SAM COALE
Special to the Journal

This riveting, fact-drenched page-turner and indictment of the CIA by New York Times reporter Tim Weiner, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his work on secret national security programs, will disgust, appall, amaze, stun and enthrall you with its naming of names, quoting of quotes, revealing of plots and ploys and serving up of yarns that involve coups, drug lords, psychopaths, fascists, juntas, murderers and militias, all in the name of peace, stability, the Pax Americana and, I guess, democracy.

Weiner has obtained tons of declassified material that appears to leave no stone unturned, no bungled assassination unsung, and no presidential and CIA-director lie unheralded. From the very beginning the agency was caught between serving up intelligence to presidents and conjuring up covert operations around the world. The latter has always won out. The former has been a disaster. It has violated its charter from the very beginning.

The CIA never predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union. It missed wars in the Middle East. It lied its way through the Vietnam War. It never saw the forest for the trees. Iraq is, therefore, not the exception in terms of catastrophes but the culmination.

All presidents have ignored or politicized the agency. Bush has militarized it. Both Democrats and Republicans have staged one subversive assault after another, creating entire political parties in other countries, such as Japan, Italy and the Congo; inciting riots; starting rumors; killing whom they see as opponents — all of it messy, bloody and questionable. To what end? Money and brute force have won out over espionage (most of it a dismal failure) every time, leaving a legacy of paranoia, conspiracy, alcoholism, mental breakdown and the polished effete façade of Groton-Yale noblesse oblige, a sleek mask for ignorance and arrogance.

The CIA stumbles through short-term tactical horrors — trying to poison Castro, taking out Mosaddeq in Iran in the 1950s, staging a coup in Guatemala, launching the Bay of Pigs, arming Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden —all of which have led to horrendous consequences: the Shah’s collapse in Iran, 40 years of death squads in Guatemala, the inevitability of Castro’s Cuba, the misguided “war on terror.”

Two caveats: The CIA and Weiner are always belaboring the ritualistic collapses of the agency, the low morale, the resignations. But if it’s such a disaster to begin with, what’s the problem? Isn’t the nature of secrecy messy and fortuitous, clandestine and intractable? It’s always turbulent and unaccountable. As Aldrich Ames, the Soviet mole, suggested, “You’ve got two or three or four thousand people running around doing espionage. You can’t monitor it. You can’t control it. You can’t check it.”

Bureaucrats are always bellowing for more workers, more programs, more control, and this just breeds further fragmentation and disconnection. The CIA’s no different. More is never enough.

Weiner is a superb journalist. His relentless style rides on stunning and often lurid detail, telegraphed in a dramatic, staccato fashion that keeps you glued to the page. But the book really isn’t a history. It lacks context. It lacks depth. It’s an in-house report card of agency horrors, snafus, and incompetence.

As Robert Gates, now Secretary of Defense, learned, “The clandestine service is the heart and soul of the agency. It is also the part that can land you in jail.”