Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

The book reads like a grocery list of failures, which is fine, but there's just too little context. Very little space is spent explaining why things didn't work - the reader is mostly left to conclude that the plan was stupid and the people attempting to execute it were also stupid.

The author also goes out of his way to share his disdain, either through direct editorializing or sharing an anecdote to demonstrate the outrageous behavior of the people involved. Simply describing the failure would have been sufficient - the remainder just made it seem like the author had an axe to grind.

Detailed history of the CIA and its many crimes and failures from its founding into the early 2000s.

i wish i read the reviews before i bought this, once weiner got to post-war italy and incompetent agents handing over sackloads of money to dodgy informants and then took us away from italy without mentioning anything about CIA stay-behinds i started to realise how liberal the author's outlook was. i just started to skim from that point onwards, the hypothesis seems to be that the CIA was a state within a state doing things completely alien and counter to the interests of american democracy, that its allying with israel was some sort of error or accident, etc. etc. avoid at all costs