AG Literary Events
Friday, September 26, 2025
2:30 pm Eastern
Shakespeare & Company, 70 Kemble Street, Lenox, Massachusetts
What role does the CIA play in U.S. foreign policy and in keeping Americans safe at home and abroad? Acclaimed journalist Tim Weiner, whose Legacy of Ashes is the definitive account of the CIA’s first sixty years, now publishes The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century, its highly anticipated sequel. Featuring unprecedented access to officers past and present, The Mission arrives at a moment of great peril—for the CIA and the nation itself—and chronicles Agency activities from 9/11 through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to today’s conflicts with Russia, China, and the White House itself.
Joining Weiner for a conversation on the current state of intelligence gathering, its effect on national security, and our shifting role on the world’s stage, is James Lawler, a former CIA operative turned spy novelist. “I fear that any administration, whether Republican or Democratic, might only hear what they want to hear,” Lawler has said. “The intelligence community can collect some of the best intelligence in the world, but if leadership does not believe it, or disregards it, then it is useless. We in the intelligence community need to tell the truth to power. We need intelligence officers and senior analysts to tell leaders, ‘This is what we see.’”
WIT Literary Festival livestreams are produced by CTSB with promotional support from The Nation.
Tim Weiner won the National Book Award for Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (2007). Its sequel, The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century, was published this summer. A longtime reporter and editor for The New York Times, he covered the CIA in Washington and conflicts on the ground in places such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan, Liberia, Cuba, Haiti, and the Philippines. 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. Those articles became his first book, Blank Check: The Pentagon’s Black Budget (1990). His other bestselling books include The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare, 1945–2020 (2020); One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon (2015); and Enemies: A History of the FBI (2012). He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Kate Doyle, an expert in human rights and freedom of information.
James Lawler served as a CIA operations officer for twenty-five years in various international posts and as Chief of the Counterproliferation Division’s Special Activities Unit. He was a member of the CIA’s Senior Intelligence Service (SIS-3) from 1998 until his retirement in 2005. A specialist in the recruitment of foreign spies, he spent more than half of his CIA career battling the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. As Chief of the A.Q. Khan Nuclear Takedown Team, which resulted in the disruption of the most dangerous nuclear weapons network in history, he was the recipient of one of the CIA’s Trailblazer Awards in 2007. He currently serves as a national security consultant and is the Senior Partner at MDO Group, which provides Human Intelligence (HUMINT) training to the Intelligence Community and the commercial sector. He has written three espionage novels: Living Lies (2021), In the Twinkling of an Eye (2022), and The Traitor’s Tale (2025), which is about treachery and treason deep within the CIA.
Garrett M. Graff has covered politics, technology, and national security for two decades. His award-winning work—including magazine articles, podcasts, documentaries, and books on topics like the presidency, World War II, 9/11, the Cold War, Watergate, and cybersecurity—uses history to explain today’s world. The former editor of Politico magazine and a longtime WIRED and CNN contributor, he writes the popular Doomsday Scenario newsletter and hosts the Edward R. Murrow Award-winning podcast, Long Shadow. He is the author of ten books, including Watergate: A New History (2022) and three acclaimed volumes of oral history: The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 (2019); When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day (2024); and, most recently, The Devil Reached Toward the Sky (2025), which is about the making and use of the atomic bomb.
Join us this September in the beautiful Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts for the WIT Literary Festival—a celebration of writers, their work, and the vital role they play in society. By bringing writers and readers together for an unforgettable weekend of timely conversations, the WIT Literary Festival reflects the belief that a rich culture of free expression is essential to a thriving democracy.
Who are we? What do we believe? In what kind of country do we want to live?
Guided by this year’s theme, The Power of Words: Authors & Activism, the WIT Literary Festival welcomes audiences to explore these abiding questions with a distinguished group of speakers renowned for their artistic virtuosity, intellectual passion, moral seriousness, restless faith, and civic engagement.
Learn more about WIT 2025 here.
