The deaths of 3,000 people on american soil at the Hands of a ruthless adversary along with the CIA's profound misreading of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) capabilities are only the latest and greatest and in a long string of U. S. intelligence failures. The American public should no longer be duped by the mystique surrounding the CIA and the greater intelligence community that is propagated by Hollywood, spy novels, and the glorified memoirs of retired CIA case officers. The CIA for too long has been given a pass in the court of public opinion by whitewashing past intelligence failures with the retort that “We have more successes that cannot be shared publicly.” The American public needs to ask direct, tough questions of the intelligence community and demand that the CIA's “business as bureaucracy” attitude will no longer be tolerated. This book is aimed at providing scholarly ammunition for that much-needed and much-belated debate and challenge.

United States government officials and the public in the aftermath of 9/11 have concentrated on bureaucratic, or top-down, approaches to fix intelligence in general and the CIA in particular with the creation of the director of national intelligence (DNI). Post–9/11 investigations including the Joint House–Senate Investigation, the Senate Select Committee's investigation, the 9/11 Commission, and, most recently, the Presidential Commission on Intelligence Capabilities against WMD all found profound shortcomings in human intelligence collection and the quality of intelligence analysis.