Part one. "In the beginning, we knew nothing" : the CIA under Truman, 1945-1953. Intelligence must be global and totalitarian ; The logic of force ; Fight fire with fire ; The most secret thing ; A rich blind man ; They were suicide missions ; A vast field of illusion -- Part two. "A strange kind of genius" : the CIA under Eisenhower, 1953 to 1961. We have no plan ; CIA's greatest single triumph ; Bomb repeat bomb ; And then we'll have a storm ; We ran it in a different way ; Wishful blindness ; Ham-handed operations of all kinds ; A very strange war ; He was lying down and he was lying up -- Part three. Lost causes : the CIA under Kennedy and Johnson, 1961 to 1968. Nobody knew what to do ; We had also fooled ourselves ; We'd be delighted to trade those missiles ; Hey, boss, we did a good job, didn't we? ; I thought it was a conspiracy ; An ominous drift ; More courage than wisdom ; The beginning of a long slide downwards ; We knew then that we could not win the war ; A political H-bomb ; Track down the foreign communists -- Part four. "Get rid of the clowns" : the CIA under Nixon and Ford, 1968 to 1977. What the hell do those clowns do out there in Langley? ; USG wants a military solution ; We are going to catch a lot of hell ; To change the concept of a secret service ; A classic fascist ideal ; The CIA would be destroyed ; Saigon signing off ; Ineffective and scared -- Part five. Victory without joy : the CIA under Carter, Reagan, and George H.W. Bush, 1977 to 1993. He sought to overthrow their system ; We were just plain asleep ; A free-lance buccaneer ; In a dangerous way ; He was running a great risk ; A con man's con man ; To think the unthinkable ; What are we going to do when the wall comes down? -- Part six. The reckoning : the CIA under Clinton and George W. Bush, 1993 to 2007 -- We had no facts ; Why in the world didn't we know? ; We're in trouble ; The threat could not be more real ; The dark side ; A grave mistake ; The burial ceremony

Traces the history of the CIA, drawing on thousands of documents to explore how the agency was created, why it has so often failed in its missions, how it is viewed by Americans and the rest of the world, and other related topics