A new book by veteran intelligence writer John Diamond describes a CIA that went into downward spiral following the collapse of the Soviet Union, reaching a nadir when it served up bad intelligence justifying the invasion of Iraq.

"Political pressure -- from the right during the Reagan years over the scope of the Soviet threat, from the left during the Clinton years over CIA ties with repressive Latin American regimes -- constantly threatened to distort the intelligence used by the government to shape its foreign policy," Diamond writes in "The CIA and the Culture of Failure: U.S. Intelligence from the End of the Cold War to the Invasion of Iraq," according publisher Stanford University Press.

Diamond contends that  a series of intelligence lapses (both real and alleged) in the decade following the Soviet collapse led "to a 'culture of failure'...a fatal cycle of error, criticism, overcorrection, distraction, and politicization that undermined the quality and quantity of information provided to decision-makers who compounded these failings with major misjudgments of their own."

Diamond, who written about the CIA for the Associated Press, the Chicago Tribune and USA Today, also has several news breaks in the book, including:

-- How a deliberate undermining of the CIA was critical to the neo-conservative push for the defense build-up in the 1970s and 80s, national missile defense in the 1990s and the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

-- How the chance arrest by Pakistan of a suspect, Mohammed Sadeeq Odeh, in the U.S. embassy bombing in Kenya tipped off bin Laden and caused al-Qaeda to change its plans for a leadership meeting, rendering the Clinton administration's retaliatory strike an embarrassing miss.

-- How the Iraq/WMD failure, one of the most consequential in CIA history, stemmed from one of the Agency's most notable successes. The great misjudgment prior to the Iraq invasion was the failure -- by the White House, Congress, and the CIA itself -- to even consider the possibility that this combined effort to disarm Iraq had, in fact, succeeded.