The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century.

Well reviewed in The New Yorker last month.

https://archive.ph/thSDf

"...The C.I.A. was a step behind during Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, but it did manage to confirm—through an agency asset inside the Kremlin, Oleg Smolenkov—that Putin was the one orchestrating it. (The agency was worried that Smolenkov would be exposed, possibly by Trump, and is presumed to have exfiltrated the asset and his family by yacht from a putative vacation in Montenegro during the summer of 2017.)
A few years later, though, when Putin began amassing troops on Ukraine’s border, the agency was in its element. At the time, in the fall of 2021, many experts did not think that a full-scale invasion was likely... The C.I.A. ... had satellite imagery of the troop buildup; it knew from sources near the Kremlin that the government was investing money in reserve forces and military contingency planning; it eventually got something very close to the actual war plan. All these factors pointed to an invasion. The C.I.A. sounded the alarm, and in the course of several months urged the Europeans and, to some extent, the Ukrainians, to prepare for war.

It was a major intelligence victory for the agency—“a return to its central mission,” ...November, 2021, the C.I.A. director, William J. Burns, a Biden appointee who’d previously been a senior U.S. diplomat, travelled to Moscow to try to talk Putin out of going to war... Putin believed that his army would roll into Ukraine with minimal opposition... turned out that Putin’s intelligence on Ukraine was a lot worse than the C.I.A.’s intelligence on him.

After Burns’s mission failed, the C.I.A. shared everything it knew with the Ukrainians. Once war began, the agency helped locate Russian troops, kill Russian generals, and run covert ops in occupied Ukrainian territory... the agency could work hand in glove with Ukrainian intelligence officers inside Ukraine to hinder the Russian invasion.

Trump’s return to office throws the C.I.A.’s success in Ukraine—and much else—into doubt. This time, Trump has made sure to put a loyalist in charge of the agency: the former Texas congressman John Ratcliffe, who promptly eliminated the agency’s diversity-hiring program—a remarkably self-defeating move for a global superpower...

Weiner concludes his book by expressing his faith in the agency’s rank and file, but with a clear sense of foreboding. If a genuine emergency were to take place, and Trump tried to use the occasion to cancel elections or declare martial law, who would be able to stop him? What if he tried to make the C.I.A. great again? “Who would disobey him,” Weiner asks, “if he ordered the clandestine service to rebuild the secret prisons, overthrow a sovereign nation, or assassinate his political enemies?” Historically, Weiner writes, the C.I.A. has not directly defied orders. But..."