Based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of articles, this is a thorough, astonishing expose of the "Black Budget"--a 36-billion-dollar cache used by the Pentagon to fund its own agenda of top-secret weapons and wars.

Now in paperback, here is the eye-opening book based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of articles exposing the "Black Budget", a $36 billion cache used by the Pentagon to fund its own secret agenda of weapons and wars.

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.