I suspect had a different author wrote the book the final opinion of the CIA could be substantially different, even with the same evidence. He choose to emphasize specific parts of CIA history and leave others behind.
When you rely on a single source, such as this text, to form your opinion then outside help is needed to rectify any errors in that text.
I have heard the whole "CIA was a complete failure" spiel before, generally from journalists mind you, and most actual scholars and historians do not agree. The problem is that you are forming overarching opinions about the CIA based on an incomplete and biased text. Any informed opinion requires additional reading of various sources.
You still seem to miss the point.
Weiner's book isn't meant to be a chronicle of the CIA doing their job. Doing their job (and doing it well) should be normality and not worth any mentioning. Instead the book concentrates on the numerous occasions where the CIA didn't do its job well -- with sometimes catastrophic and outrageous results. Let me tell you again, that the CIA was founded for one single purpose: Providing intelligence to prevent another Pearl Harbour. Since 9/11 we know, that it failed in its job. It failed to do, what it was founded for: Defending the USA against attackers, before the attack happened. And it failed badly.
In short: The book tries to explain, how it was possible to have such a big failure in the end and analyses, why the CIA wasn't able to prevent another attack on the USA by providing accurate intelligence in time. Surely also the politicians carry a lot of the fault, no doubt about that, but the core of the problem was the CIA itself -- its structure, its personnell and its leaders. And that's what the book describes.
There certainly were successes on many occasions in smaller scales but in the great scheme of things, with the most important events in history in mind, the failures weigh much heavier, than the successes. They were successful in overthrowing governments in South America or Africa but in the end they weren't successful in defending their own country, which was their original job.
The core of what should be the CIA, the human intelligence, never really got on its feet and developed into a stepchild existence over the years, playing a minor role compared to covert operations and technical recon. The inability to give correct and timely information to political leaders was responsible for a number of disasters -- the last one being the war in Iraq under the assumption that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Or where do you think that information came from, hm? Errors of that magnitude happened a lot.
Collecting information and data was never the problem. Understanding, analyzing, evaluating and drawing the right conclusion was the big problem. And it didn't make things easier, when they desparately looked for young Americans who could speak fluent Arabic -- and then let them fail the aptitude test because theire written English was bad (!)
Yes, the book doesn't cover the complete history of the CIA but merely concentrates on the failures. But it's those failures, which marked the U.S. foreign politics of the past decades. If you read about historic events and then compare them to what Weiner writes about the role the CIA played in them, you are in constant facepalm.
The bottom line of the book is not, that the CIA was a complete failure. The bottom line is, that it has almost always been a failure,
when it counted.
And I still recommend you reading it, before you're flooding me with more pastes from other websites. Can't you write something on your own on the topic? Or are you simply trying to fill me up with stuff so much, that I'm getting tired of the discussion?