The Mission

Weiner earned unusual access to serving and former CIA officers for this follow-up to Legacy of Ashes, and it shows in the texture — the book reads less like institutional history than like officers talking, on the record, about their own agency's drift. Reviewers have credited Weiner with making a secretive bureaucracy feel human, and with tracking a genuinely new story: an agency increasingly whipsawed by presidential politics rather than insulated from it. The recurring complaint, including from the New York Times, is structural — a strict chronological march through two decades of sprawling material leaves readers without much of a compass through the labyrinth, so the book's authority comes at the cost of narrative clarity.