It has been tempting to view the C.I.A. as omniscient. Yet “The Achilles Trap” (Penguin Press), Steve Coll’s chastening new book about the events leading up to the Iraq War, in 2003, shows that the agency was flying blind. Washington’s failure to foresee the Kuwait invasion was just one of what Coll calls a “cascade of errors” that would start several wars and end many lives.
Saddam made miscalculations, too. Their gravity became clear once the U.S.-led coalition entered the Gulf War and vanquished Iraq’s military with a thunderous swat. The ground fighting, absurdly one-sided, lasted only a hundred hours. Saddam was cruel, but he was not usually foolish. Couldn’t he see what he was up against?
Actually, he couldn’t. “Like many people in the Middle East and elsewhere, Saddam thought of the C.I.A. as all-knowing,” Coll writes. Saddam assumed that Washington was fully aware of his plans to take Kuwait, and he mistook Bush’s lack of objection for tacit permission. Years later, while imprisoned, he confronted a C.I.A. officer about this. “If you didn’t want me to go in,” the officer recalled Saddam asking, “why didn’t you tell me?”
Stories about the C.I.A. typically take one of two forms. The agency is staffed with either malevolent puppet masters or bumbling idiots—“The Bourne Identity” or “Burn After Reading.” Both understandings are comforting, albeit in different ways. The first pins all ills on an agency so secretive and sinister that average citizens cannot possibly be held responsible for its actions. The second, which suggests that everything’s a farce, offers absolution of another flavor.
“The CIA: An Imperial History” (Basic), an adroit new overview by the historian Hugh Wilford, accepts neither of these characterizations. After the Second World War, the United States set out to direct politics on a global scale. This mission was unpopular, hence the cloak-and-dagger secrecy, and difficult, hence the regular fiascoes. The puppets rarely performed as intended, yet that didn’t stop the puppeteers from violently yanking the strings. Many of the C.I.A.’s actions, in Wilford’s telling, can be understood as desperate and often destructive attempts to control processes that lay beyond the agency’s grasp.
Certainly, the beginning was bumpy. “We knew nothing,” the onetime C.I.A. director Richard Helms remembered. Whereas other powerful countries had long invested in foreign espionage—the French can trace their service’s origins (with interruptions) to at least Cardinal Richelieu, in the early seventeenth century—America’s spying before the Second World War had been sparse and sporadic. In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt formed the Office of Strategic Services to coördinate intelligence, but three years later Harry Truman shuttered it. Then he reconsidered and established the C.I.A., in 1947. The United States was in the strange position of towering over other countries while knowing little about them. “If you came up with a telephone book or a map of an airfield, that was pretty hot stuff,” Helms recalled.
