The CIA and the Culture of Failure: U.S. Intelligence from the End of the Cold War to the Invasion of Iraq

The 9/11 attacks and the war in Iraq sprang in no small part from massive intelligence failures, that much is well understood. How the CIA got to a point where it could fail so catastrophically is not.

According to John Diamond, this slippage results from the tendency to overlook the links between seemingly unrelated intelligence failures and to underestimate the impact of political pressure on the CIA: factors we need to examine to understand both the origin and magnitude of the 9/11 and I...