
Are spies more trouble than they're worth? - bookofjoe
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/02/are-spies-more-trouble-than-theyre-worth
======
neonate
Adam Curtis has a great post on this.

"BUGGER: Maybe the real state secret is that spies aren't very good at their
jobs and don't know very much about the world"

[https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/3662a707-0af9...](https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/3662a707-0af9-3149-963f-47bea720b460)

~~~
otakucode
I've always been stunned that the CIA is permitted to continue operation after
their many catastrophic failures. I mean, failures on a scale that are just
mind-blowing and show their intense ineffectiveness. A couple weeks before the
USSR collapsed, for instance, the CIA wrote a paper describing the USSR as a
threat continuing to grow and the largest threat on the global stage. This
isn't so much because they were incapable of seeing that the USSR was on the
brink of collapse.... well, sort of I guess it was. What I mean is that they
had the intelligence to know, but the concept was so dangerous for them to
fathom organizationally that they couldn't admit it. The USSR was their bread
and butter. They had more spies in Moscow than the KGB. We already knew the
USSR wasn't doing great when Reagan was around. When he took office, the CIA
was asked to do the standard thing and put together a bunch of briefings for
the incoming president. The head of the USSR division at the time was Aldritch
Aimes. He put together a paper saying the USSR was a paper tiger and running
out of money. The director of the CIA threw the report away and told Aimes
'the president wants an enemy and we're going to give him one'. (that was one
of the major things Aimes claimed made him jaded and led to him becoming a
double agent for the KGB because he no longer viewed the CIA as doing serious
work for good but just a group of opportunistic lackeys)

So they missed the USSR collapsing... and the fall of the Berlin wall... and
the Arab Spring... basically every gigantic sociopolitical change for the past
70 years has caught the CIA by surprised and that not being the case is
literally their only job.

~~~
Ascendency
Actually, that story shows how the CIA did their job well...but politicians
and President Reagan didn’t want to hear it and used their oversight role to
force their intelligence experts to fit their narrative. For the last 40+
years, political forces in the US are increasingly trying to distort facts to
fit narratives instead of accepting facts and then spinning / competing over
what to do about it.

------
Animats
First, you have to distinguish between intelligence gathering, which includes
"spies", and covert action, which actively tries to do something to the enemy.
There's an argument for keeping those separate, best articulated by Gen.
Reinhard Gelhen in his memoirs.

In the US, only the CIA really does both. DIA, DNI, NSA, NGA, and the
intelligence services of the military branches are mostly pure intel
gathering.

On the active side are also the various special forces units, which the US has
gathered up under the JSOC. They sometimes do intel gathering, but long-term
covert is rare. Anybody in the field on the active side will probably become
known to the enemy sooner or later.

There are historic successes in both areas, but not a huge number of them. The
US put a huge amount of effort into assessing USSR military capabilities, and
mostly got it wrong. Poor intel led to the "bomber gap" and "missile gap", and
missed the USSR's A-bomb and H-bomb, as well as the breakup of the USSR. The
USSR put a lot of effort into spying on atomic weapons, with some success
(succeeded with A-bomb, failed with H-bomb), got spies into the State
Department (useless, according to KGB archives released at the end of the cold
war) and struggled to find out how the US made reliable jet engines, without
much success.

There's a history of special operations, written for that community, for which
I don't have a reference right now. They go over the major special operations
of the 20th century. This was written pre-9/11\. For each they ask "Was it a
success" and "was it worth it"? The only operations for which both answers are
"yes" were Eben-Emael[1] and Entebbe.[2] Only Eben-Emael changed the course of
a war.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Fort_Eben-
Emael](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Fort_Eben-Emael)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Entebbe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Entebbe)

~~~
erentz
> The US put a huge amount of effort into assessing USSR military
> capabilities, and mostly got it wrong.

An impression I was left with after reading Daniel Ellsberg’s last book was
this wasn’t entirely an intelligence failure so much as it was a deliberate
ignoring of intelligence and making up of a fiction so the air force could
build lots of bombers and missiles.

I think we’ve all experienced this in our workplaces, the higher ups really
only want to hear what they want to hear, and intelligence that doesn’t fit
that very often is ignored.

~~~
Symmetry
There's also the problem that we didn't want the USSR to know that we knew
that they didn't have very many ICBMS[1]. So Eisenhower and Kennedy felt they
had to pretend in public that there was a missile gap, and spent most of their
days pretending hard that there was a missile gap. And if you spend most of
the day pretending something is true there's no way that doesn't warp your gut
level understanding of the world. So was our knowledge of the USSR's actual
capabilities useful if we didn't let it affect our policy making?

[1] They had more than enough shorter range missiles to take out ~everyone in
western Europe though.

------
hyperion2010
The repeated destruction of US humanint networks over the past 50 years is
probably one of the single largest threats it faces. Between the dismantling
of the CIA hint networks by ourselves and complete destruction of our Chinese
hint network by the Chinese, the US is blind in a huge number of situations.

This is not about the quality of any one channel, it is about needing multiple
channels with distinct provenance that can be used to cross-reference each
other. The fact that this article even frames the question as it does means
that they have completely missed the point -- there is no such thing as bad
intel, only intel that you are too blind to know is inconsistent.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
>>> complete destruction of our Chinese hint network by the Chinese,

huh? what where when?

I don't disbelief you but what was this complete destruction, when did it
happen? (related to OPM at all?)

~~~
anamexis
Probably a reference to this:
[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/20/world/asia/china-cia-
spie...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/20/world/asia/china-cia-spies-
espionage.html)

~~~
secfirstmd
AFAIK that is basically what has happened in Iran, China, Lebanon and a lot of
Russia in the past 10 years.

~~~
boomboomsubban
It happened because the CIA used shitty encryption. Someone warned them before
it happened and again while it happened, and they fired him for it.

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/02/iran_cracked_cia_go...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/02/iran_cracked_cia_google/)

~~~
secfirstmd
It's not just about encryption. That is the case for Iran and some of China.
For the rest it was terrible tradecraft and counterintelligence issues.

~~~
boomboomsubban
The piece about Iran mentions them sharing it with friendly nations, which
likely included Lebanon. I haven't heard of events like that in Russia
recently, an arrest or two but nothing major. And the encryption seems
responsible for most of the Chinese events, the "mole" seemed like an attempt
to push the blame elsewhere.

Most of the public incidents in the past ten years seems related to that CIA
failure, so I'm not sure what you're talking about.

------
jdm2212
Good intel is no substitute for good judgement. But no or bad intel seriously
impairs the ability to exercise good judgement. Pointing out stories (the same
handful that have been repeated over and over before -- MK Ultra, Cambridge 5,
Ames, etc.) of leaders with poor judgement failing to exploit good intel does
not change the value of good intel in the hands of more capable leaders.

~~~
lawn
A mass of bad intel would drown out the good intel, making it much more
difficult to make correct decisions.

It's why trolling on social media and fake news works and why keeping a good
signal-to-noise ratio is important.

~~~
wahern
That's literally true but it's also why we need spies and HUMINT more
generally rather than relying on mass surveillance and remote exfiltration.

------
AcerbicZero
You could probably pose the same question about journalists, and come up with
a similar disinterested admonishment, if you cherry picked as needed to fit
the narrative.

~~~
rhinoceraptor
You don't need to cherry pick, you just need to read an article about
something you're an expert in to see how inaccurate and surface level most
articles are.

~~~
smsm42
[https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-
amnesia/](https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/)

------
webwielder2
What has struck me from reading history, US history at least, is how often
intelligence reports prepared by the CIA, State Department, et al are accurate
and predict more or less accurately what the outcome of a given situation will
be. But time and time again, presidents will ignore their own agencies in
favor of what they deem most politically or personally attractive. Makes me
think that the whole idea of elected representatives is flawed. I think I'd
rather be governed by people who got where they are because of expertise and
experience in their field.

~~~
nostrademons
Curious if you have links to intelligence reports that turned out to be
totally accurate? The ones I can think of (both in the news media and through
personal connections to people who have worked in government) have been
stunningly inaccurate.

~~~
jonnybgood
How did you verify they were stunningly inaccurate?

~~~
mnbvkhgvmj
The Iraq war comes to mind.

~~~
nostrademons
That was one of the media-related ones that came to mind. Also, I had an
International Relations professor who was a consultant for the State
Department and had just finished giving the briefing for the next 5-year
strategic plan on August 19, 1991. He said that nobody in the Pentagon ever
considered the possibility that the Soviet Union _might not exist_ within 5
years, let alone days. Some other experience is fairly obvious just growing up
in a bicultural household with an immigrant parent who had firsthand
experience living in other parts of the world, eg. the U.S. consistently
underestimates the degree of corruption in many other countries and the degree
to which the "state" that is ostensibly our ally is actually a fiction, with
the majority of actual daily life ruled by family, ethnic, or business ties.

A lot you can verify just by looking at our strategic decisions in the moment
vs. how things turn out later and internal communications get declassified. We
didn't understand that the Sino-Soviet split had happened until decades later,
and still thought that China and Russia formed a united communist bloc well
into the 80s. A number of people still think of China as communist, which
isn't true at all.

I'm actually seeking out information contrary to my experience here - I would
love to see stories where U.S. intelligence agencies were completely on the
mark but were ignored. But my knowledge base so far is that intelligence
agencies are as vulnerable to human cognitive biases as the general public,
and frequently get basic facts wrong.

~~~
SimbaOnSteroids
We (the west) are just starting to understand that China seems to be a mafia
state in a similar way that Russia is. I was watching an ABC (the Australian
one) report about the rampant corporate misconduct of the Crown Casino, and
how they helped launder Triad money in Melbourne. It turns out that a major
player in the racket was President Xi's cousin and a high ranking member of
the CCP. Additionally, we've seen Triads deployed in Hong Kong recently to
attack protestors.

~~~
nostrademons
I think that's both true-and-not-true, depending on what level you zoom in.
Generalizing very heavily (I have some personal experience in Chinese culture,
but virtually none with Russian culture, and basically consider myself
American despite partial ethnic heritage)...

I think that Chinese corruption is very different in character from Russian
corruption. Russian corruption stems from a sort of hyper-individualism and a
belief that you need to take what you can get while you can get it, because
somebody else will if you don't. Chinese corruption, however, often starts
from the belief that the family is the fundamental unit of social
organization, over the self, country, and God. Nepotism ("filial piety") is
deeply ingrained in Chinese culture, and isn't really considered a bad thing.
Beyond the family, there's the web of social relationships and obligations
("guanxi") through which business is conducted, but Chinese people usually
don't buy appeals to higher organizing principles like patriotism or
salvation. There's an odd relationship to the concept of nationhood, as well:
here, you're American if you have a piece of paper proving American
citizenship, while for a Chinese person you are Chinese if you are ethnically
Chinese, regardless of where you're located or which passport you carry. (This
is a source of occasional tension for Chinese-Americans: when interacting with
another Chinese person, their immediate assumption is that you are Chinese too
- "You're Chinese, why don't you X?" \- while most of us are more likely to
say "Actually, I'm American.")

One thing that both China and Russia share is a weak rule of law, though. Laws
are routinely bent in both of these countries if it suits the interest of a
powerful person or furthers a relationship. America is headed in the wrong
direction in this regard - and IMHO the words of the current president don't
help here - but there's still a default assumption here that the law is _the
law_ , and that we're all equal before it. This is a fiction, but it's a
powerful fiction that has led to a lot of prosperity for America, and would
probably lead to much suffering if people stopped believing it.

~~~
hnick
Generalising also, there definitely seems to be a strain of "Take what you can
while you can" in mainland China too. One story I've heard a few times is of
restaurants that had to stop putting out free breath mints or other items
because while we know that social convention is that you take one if you need
it, a Chinese customer will just tip the whole bowl into their handbag because
it's free to take and you'd be a fool to leave it there.

I've known a lot of Singaporeans and their concept of 'kiasu'
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiasu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiasu))
is very similar, though I'm not sure if the origin of the behaviour is from
China.

~~~
nostrademons
I feel like that's also subtly different in character between Chinese and
Russian culture. In Chinese culture that impulse is primarily economic,
related to stuff & money - I'd describe it as an inability to resist free
stuff. My dad, wife, and mother-in-law all have this habit of taking
_anything_ that's free, whether they need it or not, because it's free. Come
to think of it, that's my dinner tonight, because my wife's workplace has
leftover hamburgers. Growing up my dad would have all sorts of miscellaneous
snacks in the freezer and breadbox because the supermarket was handing out
free stuff...most of the time we wouldn't eat them, but it was the principle
of the thing.

I get the sense that the Russian impulse also extends toward _power_ , though.
Chinese people generally do not have an urge to tell other people what to do.
Even when they're at the top of a hierarchy, commands are usually couched in
language of it being for the greater good, or to ensure social harmony, or
that it's simply right and natural. And this is different from the strategic
form of dissembling that is common among powerful Americans, where they tell a
broad populace that it's for their own good while secretly admitting to
themselves that it's mostly for their personal benefit. Chinese people _really
don 't make the distinction_ \- it just never occurs to them that others'
interests might not be aligned with their own. And I feel like that's very
different from the Russian impulse to seize power when they have a chance -
Russians are _keenly_ aware of when there are powerful people whose interests
do not align with their own, and then try to act quickly to ensure that they
get what they need before someone else does.

Come to think of it, a lot of Cold War (and present) foreign policy could be
explained by these cultural differences. The U.S. impulse to shore up
potential strategic options _if_ there is a challenge (but not make aggressive
moves themselves) is interpreted as a threat by Russians who assume that
American defensive moves must be a prelude to seizing power/territory/wealth.
Meanwhile, the Chinese are off in East Asia milking every bit of free stuff
out of their newly capitalist economy, which is interpreted as a threat by
both Americans and Russians but is actually just them grabbing free stuff
while possible, and they don't understand why this could possibly be construed
as offensive. The U.S. response of containment (through Hong Kong, Singapore,
the Philippines, Taiwan, etc.) is perceived as promoting disharmony among
largely ethnic Chinese people, though, which is an affront to their culture.

------
logjammin
Reading through the ~60 comments in this thread, I'm surprised that such a
large number of HN readers appear so eager to dispute Gopnik's assertion that
spying is probably not all it's cracked up to be. (Which is only half of his
entire take: that, while spying isn't all it's cracked up to be, it's still
probably somewhat necessary.) Not only is it not clear how many HN people are
intelligence professionals, making a lot of the judgment here pretty
speculative -- it points to a weird lack of civic, uh, maybe spirit is the
right word: presented with some evidence indicating that the cloak-and-dagger
people we permit to run wild in the shadows may not be all that competent, the
response isn't "well how could we verify this?" but an odd faith that a hole
into which we as a country throw piles upon piles of money without getting
anything in return is actually running really smoothly, it's just that we the
public aren't allowed to know about it because we haven't been given the
access. It sorta bugs me: _we_ allowed spies to run around in the first place;
who's giving who access here?

A common response to the article is a sort of "publication bias" argument,
that "well, we only seem to hear about espionage _failures_ because the
successes are likely to be kept under wraps." But I think this gives these
people (intelligence professionals) a bit too much credit -- and looks weirdly
obsequious for a such a garrulous, contrarian, and high-IQ group of people as
HN. The intelligence community knows the arguments Gopnik's making (well,
reviewing and making) well; they've been around for ages, as he states in the
article. If there truly were reams of intelligence successes for every failure
behind the curtain, you'd think the Caseys and Angletons of the world would be
into some kind of decades post-facto program evaluation. Why not take the
CIA's every move in, say, the decade 1946-1956 and tally the wins and losses?
Surely this stuff could be declassified, right?

 _" No one will ever know all the times we've done our job well.. but every
mistake will get us f_d up the ass."* This may have been told to the poster
sincerely, but man, I can't for the life of me come up with a better cover
story for incompetence or sloth. I _wish_ I could tell my higher-ups and
funding sources something like that when they come asking if I've done
anything well with their money lately. "Sorry, ma'am, that's classified." What
a world.

~~~
logjammin
Edit: mostly unrelated: we're all taking issue with a _book review_. Gopnik's
forming his own opinions here, sure, and we can take issue with them, but,
like, has anyone actually evaluated the claims the _authors_ are making? I'm
guessing the Cambridge historian has more to back up his arguments than Gopnik
(or any of us, for that matter) has, right?

------
busterarm
I feel like this was a clear yes 50, even 60 years ago, but no government
doesn't want to have spies if others do.

------
clavalle
I suspect it is the type of situation where 99% are a complete waste of
resources.

But that 1% that turn out to be important are very important.

And you can't tell before that time which will be which.

~~~
jdm2212
There's also a strong bias to remember/talk about the cases that turned out
poorly, not the ones that turn out well.

"CIA bungles [thing]" is a splashy headline and memorable story. "US does 10%
better in trade negotiation because it was reading the other side's emails" is
not. But one happens much more often than the other.

~~~
whatshisface
> _But one happens much more often than the other._

Probably, but we have no legitimate way of knowing which one it is.

~~~
jdm2212
There's lots of stuff where we trust that expert communities are being honest.
Medical research is impossible to verify unless you get access to the raw data
(get into a PhD program and get a grant and then get a DUA... all in all,
possibly harder than getting an intelligence community job and an SCI
clearance) but we all basically trust that medicine works the vast majority of
the time.

~~~
whatshisface
The information required to evaluate our spy agencies is unavailable to the
public no matter what school you go to. Doctors took revealed the oxy crisis
after taking merely a very long time, but revealing the CIA equivalent would
be illegal.

~~~
jdm2212
There's plenty you can say if you have a clearance that won't get you sent to
jail -- pretty much anything that doesn't state a classified fact or allow one
to be inferred. "Every mission I worked on got people killed needlessly" is
kosher for most people to say.

Anyway, generally speaking, the really juicy secrets (from a lay person's
standpoint) are not highly classified. The most secret stuff -- sources and
methods -- is generally pretty boring unless you're really deep in the weeds.

~~~
whatshisface
Let's look at Snowden as an example. What would have happened if he had
expressed a vauge, unsupported sentiment about the NSA "not being very nice,"
or "doing too much spying?" Nothing, probably. The larger public debate needs
facts that it can verify and specifics that it can pick over.

(Also, "highly classified" and "slightly classified" are the same as far as
CNN is concerned.)

~~~
corodra
I argue that the larger public doesn't need to know. Who, in the general
public, is actually qualified to determine the effectiveness of these types of
operations?

On top of that, vast swaths of the public are amazingly incompetent. Why waste
time debating with them? Flat earthers and anti-vaxxers are easy targets for
this argument. But, do you want national security operations to be influenced
by the opinion of someone who "cures" people with essential oils? It's like
asking for military tactics from a barista. Don't forget, a lot of people fall
for over the phone scams of all kinds. Not just old people. It's a wide gamut
of the population. I didn't even get into the real hardcore conspiracy nutjobs
that have the loudest voice because they have nothing better to do.

Part two, the public does a terrible job of verifying facts or ever
understanding them. That's been the public discourse for... oh... I don't
know... forever?

~~~
whatshisface
It is widely known that the public is (individually) bad at making decisions,
but they are the only group that can consistently be trusted to hold the
interests of the public at heart. It doesn't matter how smart policymakers are
if they direct their intelligence to their own benefit.

Let's say that you and someone ten times smarter than you had to decide on
what's for dinner. Even though they are smarter than you, you would still want
a say, because no matter how dumb you are you still have preferences.

It's kind of an "inverse conspiracy" to think that a group of skilled people
will conspire in secret to help you when they could be serving themselves:
without evidence, it's no more rational than negative paranoia.

(By the way, who administered IQ tests to everyone in the CIA? They're drawn
from the American population and they aren't paid millions. They could easily
have the same brains per capita as the people who believe what they hear on
cable news.)

~~~
corodra
Theres a huge assumption about the wisdom of crowds. That the individuals have
reliable info on said subject. I'd also say, are competent to use said info.
The idea came from a dude back in the early 1900s who surveyed everyone at a
county fair who was guessing on the weight of a cow or bull. The average was
off by one pound, easily to be considered a successful test of that idea.
However, let's get the same number of folks, but not farmers, instead... let's
say silicon valley app engineers. Same rules as the old school, all you can do
is look at the bovine and make a guess. Do you honestly believe they're going
to have the same crowd accuracy? Especially without tech.

At the end too, averaging and voting doesn't change reality. If a group of
people vote if an animal is a rabbit or a crow, but 75% vote rabbit, is it a
rabbit even though it's a crow? Wisdom of crowds needs to be taken with a
fistful of salt.

------
UI_at_80x24
If MOO2 has taught me anything, a good spy network is excellent at giving your
opponent an advantage unless you waste resources trying to cover your ass, in
which case you have wasted resources and the opponent still makes you suffer.

------
VxfnhTAJ
One book on the subject said that during the Cold War, Soviet surveillance was
so good the West couldn't recruit anyone in the USSR to be a spy. The only
successes the West had during that time were when a high level Soviet officer
or politician literally walked through the door and said "Hi I'd like to
defect and I have lots of useful information."

~~~
secfirstmd
That's not true. Though not very successful, there was many significant
people. One of the seemingly more interesting ones was the Head of KGB
Counterintelligence.

------
jonathanstrange
Reminds me of this photo of an office at the old site of the German BND in
Pullach, photographed by Martin Schlüter[1]:

[https://www.detail.de/fileadmin/uploads/bnd-pullach-
teaser.j...](https://www.detail.de/fileadmin/uploads/bnd-pullach-teaser.jpg)

Although it also have been some kind of joke, who knows.

[1] [https://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/bnd-bildband-ueber-
zentra...](https://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/bnd-bildband-ueber-zentrale-des-
geheimdienstes-in-pullach-fotostrecke-116732.html)

------
jdm2212
It's ironic that this was posted on the same day as the NYT reports a US intel
success that has substantively advanced American foreign policy objectives and
possibly saved lives:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/28/us/politics/us-iran-
cyber...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/28/us/politics/us-iran-cyber-
attack.html)

------
secfirstmd
One of the key issues here is also about how policy makers engage with the
Intel. For example, no matter how much good information GCHQ is gathering
about Brexit, the UK politicians recieving haven't turned it into a workable
policy. Compare that to the complete penetration of the IRA and pushing them
towards peace in the late 80s and early 90s.

------
nickik
Spies got the Soviet Union the atom bomb, the negotiator of Brandon Woods
agreement was a soviet spy and there are many many more examples. Then again,
the Soviet Union had the advantage of leading a global communist network and
had a truly transnational universal movement to draw from.

However that said, intelligence agencies and spies can do much harm as well
and are a necessary foreign element to democracy and even republicanism.

Any state should be really careful and think hard with how and what kind of
intelligence service you build for your country.

\-------------------

P.S: Interesting story, Stalin had the best spy network in history and
systematically perched his foreign intelligence networks (and diplomatic core)
and basically received basically no foreign intelligence for weeks.

------
paganel
> Richard Sorge, a Russian spy in Germany’s Embassy in Japan, gained detailed
> knowledge about the approaching German invasion of Russia in 1941, and
> passed it on. Stalin not only ignored information about the coming invasion
> but threatened anyone who took it seriously, since he knew that his ally
> Hitler wouldn’t betray him

I know there's an entire controversy around this subject that merits even its
own wikipedia entry [1], but the fact is that Germany's intention to do
something against the Soviets was clear for anyone who wanted to see it.

I live in Bucharest, Romania, and I frequently visit an antique bookstore
close to me which right at this moment sells some photos of Hitler's German
troops who are shown as preparing/training with the Romanian troops on
Romanian ground in the spring of 1941 (in April, to be more precise), at least
according to the date written on the back of those photos. Presumably these
were not secret military maneuvers, presumably the German soldiers who had
entered Romania as allies were there for everybody to see, even to people
sympathetic to the Soviets who might have let the Soviets know about said
German troops, so not everything depended on a Russian spy's message being
ignored or not, the Germans were right at the Soviets' door and preparing to
break it.

I also don't believe for one second that Stalin would think of other people as
having the chance to "betray" him or not, as far as I've read about the guy he
didn't give anyone the chance to betray him, especially not to the head of
State of a foreign power and potential enemy. You could say that Hitler was
naive enough to let July 20th 1944 happen, but during all of Stalin's bloody
reign nothing of the sorts happened because he was ruthless, and being
ruthless first of all means not trusting other people, especially not a guy
like Hitler.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_offensive_plans_controv...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_offensive_plans_controversy)

~~~
DenisM
“They” say that Stalin believed Germany was not ready for war yet and would
only attack the next year, so he didn’t want to tip his hand by visibly
preparing for war too early.

In a way he was right on the first point - Germany wasn’t ready for a
protracted winter-time conflict. However they attacked anyway, brazenly
confident they would be finished before the winter cold sets in, and also
maybe desperate to strike before Stalin has a chance to strike first.

Nothing to do with friends and betrayals, just a series of miscalculations on
all sides.

Or so “they” say.

------
yters
Seems the author wants to discredit the intelligence service, but then
backtracks at the end to indict Trump's collusion with Russia b/c "it's
obvious that Trump is colluding and the intelligence is not telling us
anything we don't already know."

~~~
jessaustin
Eh, the author's heart doesn't seem to be in that paragraph. It might have
been added at an editor's insistence? Besides, whether you support Trump or
not, he is proof that the president doesn't really need intelligence agencies.

------
ourmandave
<Humming the Jame Bond theme song> Yes, they are!

------
joewee
Great read.

------
meowface
(Apologies for the mega-long comment.)

Intelligence done poorly is probably worse than no intelligence (which I think
is partly what this article is saying, and of course intelligence is indeed
often done poorly), but the tone of the article feels very "here are a bunch
of cases of US intelligence gone awry; your tax dollars at work! MKULTRA!" A
paragraph does actually start with "Your tax dollars at work." Yes, we know
the CIA did unethical and awful things that provided no intelligence value,
such as dosing people with LSD, unbeknownst to them, in MKULTRA.

The only non-US critiques are Stalin ignoring or not believing intelligence
about the German attack, and the KGB concerned fake defectors (double agents)
would fly the coop and defect for real, but I don't think Stalin is exactly a
good example of a typical analyst of intelligence or that the situation with
the USSR and defection to America implies an inherent folly in intelligence
gathering. It's lacking nuance; though I suppose that shouldn't be too
surprising for an editorial that begins with a question which it weaselly
wants you to answer in the affirmative.

I have never worked in intelligence or for the government or military or
anything, but, to me, it sounds like the article is just describing common
fallacies and biases and internal politicking and status-jockeying that shitty
and narrow-minded intelligence collectors/analysts/managers would be guilty
of. It kind of has a tone suggesting as if barely anyone in any intelligence
position possesses the capacity for self-reflection and higher-level thinking.

For example:

>The rule that having more intelligence doesn’t lead to smarter decisions
persists, it seems, for two basic reasons. First, if you have any secret
information at all, you often have too much to know what matters. Second,
having found a way to collect intelligence yourself, you become convinced that
the other side must be doing the same to you, and is therefore feeding you
fake information in order to guide you to the wrong decisions.

Yes, sure. Too much information can make things difficult. Myopic paranoia
(rather than healthy skepticism) about your intelligence and sources is bad.
And the US, and I'm sure every country, is guilty of these mistakes. But the
article is speaking in a kind of authoritative, almost absolute way, as if
it's impossible to extricate the good and valuable from the bad and counter-
productive. As if none of these people are highly aware of all of this and are
constantly questioning their assumptions and trying to falsify their own
hypotheses.

The article also says this:

>It’s remarkably hard to find cases where a single stolen piece of information
changed the course of a key battle.

For one, they didn't mention that there may be cases we don't know about
because the details are still highly classified. But it also just seems like
they're kind of missing the whole point. This is all part of a very complex
system with a lot of moving parts. It affects decision-making and events in
complex ways. It often can't be reduced to "and it's what made us win this
tactical battle", or something. (And also, even if you theoretically had
perfect intelligence about an enemy before a battle, there are a lot more
factors going into a military engagement. Your intelligence isn't necessarily
going to prevent them from killing all of you with a bunch of RPGs and
grenades, even if you know where they are, know how many there are, and know
that they're armed with RPGs and grenades.)

And they didn't really touch much on how it's helped win entire wars or shape
major world events, even if (ostensibly) not battles, beyond a bit of lip
service to the famous and undeniably successful WWII D-Day ruse.

For example, ISIS and their larger plans and goals were architected by a
mostly secular and particularly ambitious Iraqi intelligence colonel. He
likely received KGB/Stasi training, as did many other people in Iraq's
intelligence agencies under Saddam Hussein. He likely directly modeled much of
ISIS's governing style based on his training and experience in intelligence,
with documents containing meticulous detail concerning how to take over Syria,
how to operate an omnipresent Stasi-esque intelligence apparatus to secure the
group's power, how to most effectively do propaganda, etc. This intelligence
"state within a state" (the Stasi to ISIS's East Germany) - I guess you could
say it's a "deep state" \- was called Emni, and may have been more responsible
for ISIS's success than their military forces and actions.

Given a few different hypothetical dice rolls of history in the past decade,
one intelligence officer may have been very close to establishing a vast
empire. Without his background, and without building a carefully-crafted
intelligence apparatus deeply into the foundation of ISIS - one that may have
rivaled the Stasi and KGB in many respects and was developed based on their
models - they may not have experienced nearly as much success as they did.

Putin probably became prime minister / president / dictator-for-life in large
part through his experience in intelligence.

Intelligence killed Osama bin Laden and many of his officers.

Intelligence revealed the USSR's true capabilities (after bad intelligence
misled the US about their capabilities) and found the nuclear missiles in Cuba
before much more were about to be shipped over.

Intelligence helped the US win naval engagements in the Pacific theatre by
knowing where the enemy fleet was and what it planned to do.

Intelligence turned an entire state (East Germany) into a surveillance
dystopia despite no modern surveillance technology.

Austria's government was just toppled a few months ago in what was most likely
an intelligence operation.

Intelligence campaigns likely helped and are helping foment a lot of discord
in the US and around the world as we speak.

Spies were and are very much worth the trouble for those states and people.

This was kind of a confusing read until I got to the end and reached the
possible apex of the piece, and now I'm wondering if the entire piece was
possibly just a setup to reassure liberals about Trump's complicity in a
Russian conspiracy, or something like that, and that a most of the rest was
pretty much just filler to lead up to that conclusion.

>Where we may go wrong is in valuing stealthily obtained information over
unglamorous, commonly shared knowledge. And so the disappointment that
liberals, newly sympathetic to our intelligence services, found in the Mueller
report lay simply in the fact that what was most shocking in it was already
well known. The Russian conspiracy went on largely in the open, with most of
the clandestine bits hidden under a diaphanous cover. Donald Trump’s genius
was, as it so often is, his inability to dissemble: no one can quite believe
what he gets away with because we assume that a public act is unlikely to be
incriminating. We interpret as strut and boasting what is actually a
confession. Richard Nixon, a genuinely Shakespearean villain, had full
knowledge of his wrongdoing and a bad conscience about it, if not enough of
one. Trump is a figure right out of the Theatre of Cruelty; he just acts out,
without any mental inner workings, aside from narcissist necessity. Had his
“Russia, if you’re listening . . .” been encrypted in a text, it would have
had the force of a revelation. Made openly, it seemed merely braggadocio.

I do think the article does paint a good, comprehensive picture of just how
much trouble can be caused when this process goes awry, with examples, and
that is absolutely extremely important to talk about. But taken as a whole,
its tone and angle is kind of noxious to me.

If there are any people with experience in intelligence, do you agree with
this assessment? What do you think of the article?

~~~
nickik
> The only non-US critique is Stalin ignoring or not believing intelligence
> about the German attack, but I don't think Stalin is exactly a good example
> of a typical analyst of intelligence.

One should also not, that we now know more about this thanks to Steven Kotkin
work. Stalin had a lot of evidence that the German might attack, but he also
had a lot that they might not as the Germans both ran a major counter
intelligence campaign and native disbelieve that such an operation would not
be smart.

The evidence he had was not as bullet prove as the histories often write it,
if you look in real time at the information Stalin had.

------
yters
What country volunteers to be the first to disband its intelligence services?

------
vectorEQ
most spies are highly efficient and useful to our governments goals /
protecting people from bad things. the hand-full of derps we see in the news
are unfortunate but shouldn't be taken as the general state of spying /
intelligence work.

people like to make an elephant out of a mosquito, but in reality, without
spies crime / terrorism and other things generally bad for our society (which
we do all cherish and want to keep, admit it. you want your house, tv and job
safety, and to go to work without having too much worries if you will be able
to go home at end of the day safely) would be able to cause much more
disruption.

i'd agree that in recent times, especially in the cyber / internet domain
there have been grave mistakes / misjudgements made on all sides of the
fences, but the evilness / incompetence etc. etc. is by far overestimated by
the public.

this is the same idea as that 'all banks are bad' just because some bankers
misbehave or make bad calls. you still want banks and use them, so perhaps try
to see that people arent inherently bad or incompetent, and are trying their
best to avoid such calamities.

be sure that for any 'incompetence' which comes to light, internally these
agencies are much much more critical and taking action than what you 'see'
them doing.

most of this work (99.99999999%) is still not in the public eye and will never
be. saying spying is inherently bad due to some mistakes is grosly
underestimating what good they do, and overestimating the incompetence / bad
intentions of these actors and agencies.

you never hear it if a spy does a good job, he'll just submit some
intelligence, or prevent some calamity, and remain anonymous. these people
should be praised, not shot down due to some of their colleagues missing the
mark.

remember you are observing MEDIA, not actual reality. if the media speaks
about most topics, you will take their words with a bucket of salt, but if
they speak about corporate or goverment mishaps, suddenly their word is
absolute truth? get real.

~~~
hutzlibu
"most spies are highly efficient and useful to our governments goals /
protecting people from bad things. the hand-full of derps we see in the news
are unfortunate but shouldn't be taken as the general state of spying /
intelligence work."

Sources?

Because there is this other theory, that the "handful of derps" we see in the
media are just the tip of the iceberg, because most failures can and do get
shoved easily under the carpet, with a "top secret" stamp.

~~~
vectorEQ
you want me to send some nytime linkes for u there :')... sure they are
reliable sources. :')...

offering counter-point as most views are highly negative and paranoid. but i
suppose in my country, there's not really much negative media about these sort
of things, guess intelligence agency quality and media coverage varies by
country, feeding this paranoia of you guys (guessing most will be basing their
well founded and very knowlegable opinions on US media posts.)

in my country, the coverage for our intelligence services looks much more
positive... [https://nos.nl/artikel/2253313-mivd-we-hebben-russische-
hack...](https://nos.nl/artikel/2253313-mivd-we-hebben-russische-hack-van-
opcw-in-den-haag-voorkomen.html) (sorry, sure you can figure out google
translate.. - and yes, tis is also public media, highly reliable source as
always. :')... but i guess at least it's public enough for u...)

~~~
boomboomsubban
Media coverage of the intelligence agencies is disgustingly positive in the
US. Most of the press will report anything they say and cable news is overrun
with their representatives. Hell, the New York Times has delayed or cancelled
stories that would be embarrassing to them.

