This SDG will seek to understand the relationship between American Foreign Policy and the CIA in the 21st Century examining the good, the bad and the ugly. The core book is Tim Weiner's The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century, which is based on-the-record interviews with six former CIA directors and scores of spies, station chiefs, and top operations officers. The Mission is the gripping and revelatory story of the modern CIA, from 9/11, to the covert operations in Afghanistan, the pivot to Iraq, Weapons of Mass Destruction, Black sites, "enhanced interrogation techniques", the killing of Osama bin Laden, drone warfare, Russia's influence on US elections, the winding down of the War in Afghanistan, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the rise of China, the relationship between the Agency and Presidents G. W. Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden and concluding with the Agency's own fight for survival under the current president. The Mission is Tim Weiner's epic successor to Legacy of Ashes, his National Book Award–winning classic about the CIA's first sixty years. We will also view several films relevant to the topic, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Snowden, Zero Dark Thirty, and The Report. We will try to answer the question of what impact the Agency should have and will have on US Foreign Policy in the future.
1. Prologue: The Spy and the Scribe. Chapter One: The Dark Horizon, Chapter Two: Denial and Deception, Chapter Three: "It Was All Sadly Absurd", and Chapter Four: The Bay of Goats, and Chapter Five: The New World.
2. Chapter 6: "We Were All Making It up as We Went Along", Chapter Seven: Unprecedented Trouble, Chapter Eight: What You Do When You Do Not Know, and Chapter Nine: Sufi Mystics and Walking Zombies. The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Director Mira Nair, Cine Mosaic, 2012.
3. Chapter Ten: A Beautiful Operation, Chapter Eleven: The Butcher's Bill, Chapter Twelve: Guerilla Warfare, and Chapter Thirteen: The Black Cloud.
4. Chapter Fourteen: "How Far Were We Prepared to Go", Chapter Fifteen: The God's-Eye View, Chapter Sixteen: No Middle Ground., Chapter Seventeen: The Keys to the Castle, and Chapter Eighteen: The Right Side of History. Snowden, Director Oliver Stone, Endgame Entertainment, 2016.
5. Chapter Nineteen: "Someone Is Always Watching", Chapter Twenty: Lethal and Legal, Chapter Twenty-One: Face Eating Baboons, and Chapter Twenty-Two: The Useful Idiot. Zero Dark Thirty, Director Kathryn Bigelow, Columbia Pictures, 2012.
6. Chapter Twenty-Three: Ring-Kissing an Kneecapping, Chapter Twenty-Four: The Enemy of Intelligence, Chapter Twenty-Five: "We Are on the Way to a Right-Wing Coup', and Chapter Twenty-Six: The Glory Gate. The Report, Director Scott Burns, Vice Studios, 2019.
7. Chapter Twenty-Seven: Human Intelligence, Chapter Twenty-Eight: The Morality of Espionage, and Epilogue: Autocracy in America. What have we learned?
Tim Weiner, The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century, New York, Mariner Books, 2025.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Director Mira Nair, Cine Mosaic, 2012.
Snowden, Director Oliver Stone, Endgame Entertainment, 2016.
Zero Dark Thirty, Director Kathryn Bigelow, Columbia Pictures, 2012.
The Report, Director Scott Burns, Vice Studios, 2019.