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What will become of the CIA?
The covert agency has long believed in the power of knowing one’s enemy. But these days the threats are coming from above.
The great rivalries of the age were between Biggie and Tupac, “Friends” and “Seinfeld.” When, in the late nineteen-nineties, Al Qaeda began mounting ever more sophisticated terror attacks—bombing two American embassies in East Africa, in 1998, and then blowing a giant hole in the hull of a Navy ship, the U.S.S. The 1953 coup in Iran—which toppled Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and handed ruling power to what had previously been a constitutional monarchy—was, in Weiner’s account, a Pyrrhic victory: it gave the agency and its masters the dangerous impression that this was something they could pull off at will. He put an end to torture, drew down forces in Iraq, and, when the C.I.A., after years of painstaking detective work, finally found bin Laden in a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, authorized the SEAL-team mission that killed him.
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