2007 Winner

The history of the CIA from its creation after World War II, through its battles in the cold war and the war on terror, to its near-collapse after 9/ll. Tim Weiner is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times. For the past twenty years, he has covered the CIA and reported from eighteen nations (including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan, Liberia, Cuba, Haiti, and the Philippines), covering wars, coups, and the foreign policies of the United States. Joining The Times in 1993, he has served as a national-security correspondent based in Washington, and a foreign correspondent based in Mexico City. As an investigative reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer, he was awarded the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, in recognition of articles exposing the secret spending of the Pentagon and the CIA. In 1990, those articles grew into his first book, Blank Check: The Pentagon’s Black Budget. From 1993 to 1999, as the Washington bureau reporter covering the CIA for The New York Times, he broke more than 100 page-one stories on the Agency and its troubles. Legacy of Ashes is his third book.