"In the beginning, we knew nothing" : the CIA under Truman, 1945-1953 -- "A strange kind of genius" : the CIA under Eisenhower, 1953 to 1961 -- Lost causes : the CIA under Kennedy and Johnson, 1961 to 1968 -- "Get rid of the clowns" : the CIA under Nixon and Ford, 1968 to 1977 -- Victory without joy : the CIA under Carter, Reagan, and George H.W. Bush, 1977 to 1993 -- The reckoning : the CIA under Clinton and George W. Bush, 1993 to 2007.

Intelligence must be global and totalitarian -- The logic of force -- Fight fire with fire -- The most secret thing -- A rich blind man -- They were suicide missions -- A vast field of illusion -- We have no plan -- CIA's greatest single triumph -- Bomb repeat bomb -- And then we'll have a storm -- We ran it in a different way -- Wishful blindness -- Ham-handed operations of all kinds -- A very strange war -- He was lying down and he was lying up -- Nobody knew what to do -- We had also fooled ourselves -- We'd be delighted to trade those missiles -- Hey, boss, we did a good job, didn't we? -- I thought it was a conspiracy -- An ominous drift -- More courage than wisdom -- The beginning of a long slide downwards -- We knew then that we could not win the war -- A political H-bomb -- Track down the foreign communists -- What the hell do those clowns do out there in Langley? -- USG wants a military solution -- We are going to catch a lot of hell -- To change the concept of a secret service -- A classic fascist ideal -- The CIA would be destroyed -- Saigon signing off -- Ineffective and scared -- He sought to overthrow their system -- We were just plain asleep -- A free-lance buccaneer -- In a dangerous way -- He was running a great risk -- A con man's con man -- To think the unthinkable -- What are we going to do when the wall comes down? -- We had no facts -- Why in the world didn't we know? -- We're in trouble -- The threat could not be more real -- The dark side -- A grave mistake -- The burial ceremony.

Here is the hidden history of the CIA: why eleven presidents and three generations of CIA officers have been unable to understand the world; why nearly every CIA director has left the agency in worse shape than he found it; and how these failures have profoundly jeopardized our national security. For sixty years, the CIA has managed to maintain a formidable reputation in spite of its terrible record, burying its blunders in top-secret archives. Its mission was to know the world--when it did not succeed, it set out to change the world instead. Now Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Weiner offers the first definitive history of the CIA, based on more than 50,000 documents, primarily from the archives of the CIA itself, and hundreds of interviews with CIA veterans, including ten Directors of Central Intelligence.--From publisher description.