The Transformation Of The CIA

With Jane Clayson in for Tom Ashbrook.

From spymasters to killing machines, New York Times Reporter Mark Mazzetti on the CIA’s transformation, and its chilling impact on how we fight wars.

We have come a long way from Bunker Hill and ‘don’t shoot till you see the whites of their eyes.’ In the last decade, we've done a lot of shooting in a lot of places --in a lot of new ways.  Private contractor spies, drones, CIA paramilitaries.  Sometimes, they've worked with steely efficiency.

But we've also let a lot of genies out of the bottle, says our guest today.  In a groundbreaking new book, New York Times National Security correspondent  Mark Mazzetti tracks an astonishing cast of characters on the ground in the shadow wars.

This hour On Point: how we fight and kill now.
-Karen Shiffman 

Mark Mazzetti, national security correspondent for the New York Times. Author of "The Way of the Knife: The CIA, A Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth." (@markmazzettinyt)

The New York Times (Mark Mazzetti) "More than two years later, the Raymond Davis episode has been largely forgotten in the United States. It was immediately overshadowed by the dramatic raid months later that killed Osama bin Laden — consigned to a footnote in the doleful narrative of America’s relationship with Pakistan. But dozens of interviews conducted over several months, with government officials and intelligence officers in Pakistan and in the United States, tell a different story: that the real unraveling of the relationship was set off by the flurry of bullets Davis unleashed on the afternoon of Jan. 27, 2011, and exacerbated by a series of misguided decisions in the days and weeks that followed."

The Miami Herald "Even as its civilian leaders publicly decried U.S. drone attacks as breaches of sovereignty and international law, Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency secretly worked for years with the CIA on strikes that killed Pakistani insurgent leaders and scores of suspected lower-level fighters, according to classified U.S. intelligence reports."

Frontline "The 1975-76 Church Committee congressional hearings probed widespread intelligence abuses by the FBI, CIA, IRS and NSA. Headed by Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho) in the wake of the Watergate scandal, the committee exposed how under the guise of national security agencies spied on American citizens for political purposes during the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations."

Video: Raymond Davis 2011 Interrogation