All-powerful, brilliant, decisive, ruthlessly effective ... this is the image of the CIA as portrayed in countless films and novels. It is wrong.

This shocking book, based on thousands of declassified documents and interviews with agents at all levels, shows the reality behind the glamorous myth: a blundering, chaotic and dangerously incompetent organization, so ineffective it was nicknamed 'Can't Identify Anything' by Nato forces. In a story of botched coups, missed targets, lost operatives and fatal errors, Tim Weiner shows how the CIA now poses a threat not only to the security of the US, but the world.

Tim Weiner is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist at the New York Times where he has reported from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan, and fifteen other nations. He was based for a decade in Washington, DC, where he covered the CIA and the military - the last topic being the basis for his famous book Blank Check: The Pentagon's Black Budget.