
Bugger: Maybe the real state secret is spies aren't good at their jobs (2013) - tjalfi
https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/3662a707-0af9-3149-963f-47bea720b460
======
bscphil
This is kind of a strange (though interesting) article. The headlining claim
is that "spies aren't good at their jobs". But does the article support that?

> The terrible truth that began to dawn in the 1980s was that MI5 - whose job
> it was to catch spies that threatened Britain - had never by its own devices
> caught a spy in its entire history.

The whole article focuses on MI5, which I'm not really familiar with, and
claims that their sole purpose is _defensive_ , to catch spies, and not to spy
on other countries. But almost by definition, if Soviet spies were left in
high places for decades through the incompetence of MI5, doesn't that mean the
Soviet spy agency had a pretty decent track record, either by luck, or by
their competence in exploiting the specific weaknesses of MI5?

I think it's more likely that the focus on defense is at fault, and not the
focus on MI5 in particular. If you get a bunch of spies together, and task
them with discovering other spies, then they'll probably find some people who
may or may not be actual spies. The problem is in part that the base rate of
spies is very low, but also that the people sent to spy in other countries for
the most part seem to have kept a low profile (they didn't become head of MI5
or Prime Minister, for example), and _also_ as the article states, that
suspiciousness starts to crowd out your actual evidence.

But get a bunch of spies together, and task them with gathering intelligence
in other countries, and maybe they'll have a much better time of it, on
average. At least, if this article provides me with a reason to think anything
about this question, it makes me think that they typically were.

So all in all it's a nice story, but it's not clear that the claim in the
headline is warranted.

~~~
secfirstmd
There is no doubt that MI5 was effectively rubbish in the spy vs spy games
during the Cold War. But it's also possible to go a bit far in judging them
purely on that basis.

If you (allow me to remove the civil liberties issues for a second) look more
towards Northern Ireland and assess its success (from a UK gov point of view),
along with RUC SB (the most important UK org in the conflict), SIS and the
FRU, then it's a slightly different assessment you'd have to take. Of course
interpretation depends on your viewpoint and how you patch the pieces of the
story together. Considering the amount of Islamic radicialisation in the UK,
it and CTC/SB have arguably been fairly successful. A similar sort of
assessment could probably be made about the Communist Party in the UK - it was
effectively going no where and well infiltrated. Though there were blips
around miners and bits of the Labour Party, MI5 and Special Branch had such a
tight hold of them post 1950 to the point where they were actually chasing
their tail and seeing conspiracies where none existed.

I think reading the various bits of information to come out since the Cold War
about the CIA in Russia can also probably show how little they really achieved
there in the spy game. There is a whole genre of similar sorts of stories
waffling away about disguises and technology but recently there was are
challenges to the orthodoxy around that. Essentially successes were pretty
minimal, dangles were swallowed all the time etc. Worth reading this on that
topic "Fictitious Spies and Fake History"
[https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08850607.2019.16...](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08850607.2019.1668247?journalCode=ujic20)

~~~
ciarannolan
>There is no doubt that MI5 was effectively rubbish in the spy vs spy games
during the Cold War.

This is not even remotely true. At one point they knew of every single KGB spy
in the UK.

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

~~~
secfirstmd
They most certainly did not. They didn't know about Norwood amongst others
until after Mitrokhin.

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

Plus their successes were towards the end of the Cold War. They were
effectively neutered by their own arrogance, ego and class blinding
foolishness in the Russia sense until the 80s.

~~~
mhh__
Norwood retired when Gordievsky was still in Denmark if I have my dates
correct, which is probably why he never heard about her (he never made it
quite to the top of the tree).

"I did what I did, not to make money, but to help prevent the defeat of a new
system which had, at great cost, given ordinary people food and fares which
they could afford, a good education and a health service" (As with most Soviet
spies she lived the lie until she died)

------
vinceguidry
If you think about it, it really shouldn't be surprising. James Bond and other
spy movies have convinced us that the government just has endless amounts of
money to throw at hard problems. But they don't. Even though the numbers
involved are staggering, government departments fight tooth and nail for
allocations.

The cash you do get, you have to spend most of it on things that make your
department look good rather than what will make you better at your job. Then
there's plain ole' fraud, waste and abuse, trying to instill an ethic of
frugality into someone who is in charge of more taxpayer money a month than
they make in a year, well a lot of times that's just going to fall on deaf
ears.

Spy departments derive effectiveness mostly from having the ability to skirt
the law rather than training or having better equipment. The government does
have people that really know what they're doing. But their time and attention
is limited, again mostly to projects that make their departments look good.

As a result it's much easier than you'd think to get away with a lot more than
you would think you could.

~~~
Spooky23
I think that’s a common, but flawed outlook on it.

Early in my career I worked for a social services department, a department
that was constantly kicked around in the press for various “scandals”,
incompetence, etc.

It certainly wasn’t the most efficient organization that I’ve seen, but it was
not much worse than fortune 100 companies that I’ve worked for or done
business with. And For all of the woes, it was very good at what it did.
Benefit payments were made, enrollments done, procurements procured, hearings
adjudicated, audits completed.

It’s easy to get caught up in the noise and determine that these organizations
are incompetent and ineffective. The reality is that usually the machine of
state is very good at what it does, but they measure many aspects of success
with a different measure (compliance) than a company (profit).

~~~
dcolkitt
Systematic research using large datasets shows that public sector
organizations are associated with significantly worse management practices.[1]
Public sector organizations are nearly as poorly managed as the worse category
of private sector firms: those run by the heirs of the original founder.

In particular public sector organizations have significantly worse incentive
structures, are much more likely to promote based on tenure rather than
competence, and are much more likely to retain low performing employees.

[1]
[https://www.nber.org/papers/w17850.pdf](https://www.nber.org/papers/w17850.pdf)

~~~
lmm
> In particular public sector organizations have significantly worse incentive
> structures, are much more likely to promote based on tenure rather than
> competence, and are much more likely to retain low performing employees.

Have these practices been measured to cause worse outcomes? Not so long ago
there was a paper here that said most companies would be better off promoting
at random than the measures they actually use, and we all know how practices
like stack ranking can destroy team cohesion.

~~~
n4r9
That is the question. From early on in the paper:

> we define “best” management practices as those that continuously collect and
> analyze performance information, that set challenging and interlinked short-
> and long-run targets, and that reward high performers and retrain/ fire low
> performers

It appears that the purpose of the paper is to apply a set of normative
judgements in order to validate at a shallow level the types of preconceptions
that GP was questioning. It's not a surprise that government organisations
aren't operating in a cut throat manner.

~~~
Spooky23
Exactly.

MBA students are going to be looking for specific indicators and terminology
(OKRs, KPI dashboards, etc) and things like comp plans. That's not because
they are stupid or evil, it's just their world. They aren't trained to
understand performance management in an environment where collective
bargaining gives employees due process rights, for example. Conversely, public
sector leaders are going to struggle with Sarbanes-Oxley compliance or
financial decisions that incorporate tax optimization.

Your state/local government isn't going to provide meaningful incentive
compensation, for the simple reason that it doesn't work in most cases and
taxpayers won't tolerate paying rewards to people for doing their job.

You also need to evaluate the effectiveness of governance differently, because
management within an organization is not empowered in the same way. If
Congress or a state legislature decrees that you must do X in Y way, you need
to do Y, even if it doesn't make sense or is inefficient. Usually in a
corporation business management is expected to own their P&L on a broader
scope and optimize. Public sector managers can only optimize in the (more
limited) scope they control, and only with the consent of the
elected/appointed official or board.

------
throwaway1917
It so happens that this story has since moved on slightly since it was last
posted. Two years ago, Michael Bettaney died. I knew him briefly - after he
got out of jail, he moved into small-group communist politics, where we
crossed paths.

The stuff about his incompetence as a spy is rather overstated. By the time I
knew him, he certainly had a drink problem, which may for all I know have
predated his long prison sentence (much of it in solitary). The truth is of
course that MI5 was not the only intelligence agency with double agents and he
was shopped by one such British KGB mole, Oleg Gerdievsky. One rather suspects
that the fate of the cold war did not hang in the balance.

The underlying point - that counterintelligence has very often proved to be a
spectacular waste of human effort - stands, although that is hardly a reason
to be insouciant about mass surveillance.

~~~
tialaramex
> The underlying point - that counterintelligence has very often proved to be
> a spectacular waste of human effort - stands, although that is hardly a
> reason to be insouciant about mass surveillance.

Mass surveillance causes significant problems regardless of whether
intelligence works, and so not only does it make sense for the IETF to write
that "Pervasive monitoring is an attack" but I believe that it's morally right
for us to say that therefore we should demand our governments desist from such
attacks.

But that article takes a pretty typical Adam Curtis angle when it comes to
facts that dismantle his core thesis - acknowledge them very briefly and then
carry on as if they didn't exist. Double Cross is less than a hundred years
ago and took place under the circumstance in which actual spies are more
valuable - a war. It can and should continue to be held up as an example of
how actually sometimes (in a war for example) there _are_ enemy spies and
turning or eliminating them _can_ be significant.

In the modern era we fight a lot of actions short of war. The most significant
subsequent military action in the UK was the Falklands in 1982. But something
like Double Cross would have been pointless. Britain did not go to war against
Argentina. Argentina wasn't at with Britain. Both countries disagreed about
the status of the Falklands, which the Argentinians had (for local political
reasons) decided to just seize by force. Because this wasn't a war per se, our
"intelligence" was mostly just a result of being friendly with the (similarly
awful but not hostile to us) regime in neighbouring Chile. No James Bond
types, just somebody who will turn a blind eye to human rights abuses and
focus on immediate military intelligence resources.

~~~
082349872349872
Körner, "The Pleasures of Counting" (1996), has a bit in "The Poles" (on
breaking Enigma) that might shed some light on traditional tradecraft vs mass
surveillance. (compare what the Stasi could accomplish with their non-
automated labour-intensive methods)

> Churchill's romantic soul loved the excitement and secrecy surrounding
> Bletchley. He relished the way that

>> ... old procedures, like the setting up of agents, the suborning of
informants, the sending of messages written in invisible ink, ... all turned
out to be largely cover for this other source, as one might keep some old-
established business in rare books going in order to be able, under cover of
it, to do a thriving trade in pornography and erotica.

2nd level quote from Muggeridge, "Chronicles of Wasted Time" (1973) p139

------
peter_l_downs
I'll set aside the usual commentary on Adam Curtis just to highly recommend
this article by Adam Gopnik on the utter futility/uselessness of spying
[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/02/are-spies-
more...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/02/are-spies-more-trouble-
than-theyre-worth) it's damn-well convincing.

~~~
n4r9
For a comedic take on the topic, the British satirist Chris Morris released a
movie called The Day Shall Come a couple of years ago which explores how
"news" is constructed by media jointly with organisations like the FBI. It's
not as entertaining as Four Lions imo but it's very well researched as usual.

------
DaftDank
Before I glanced at the authors name, I knew this was Adam Curtis just from
the writing style. Instantly reminded me of "Hypernormalisation" (which
everyone should watch) and "The Power of Nightmares."

------
tjalfi
(submitter)

This post was previously submitted in 2013[0][1] and 2017[2].

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6184984](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6184984)
\- 102 comments

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6690913](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6690913)
\- 11 comments

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14500633](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14500633)
\- 139 comments

------
RNCTX
It's still baffling to me that we are expected to believe, for example, that
the CIA passes out millions of dollars in war-torn obscenely poor countries
like Afghanistan, versus the more obvious assumption that people who work for
the CIA have more suitcases full of cash buried around the world than Pablo
Escobar ever did.

------
alexpotato
There is also the interesting case where spies and intelligence can be TOO
good.

It goes something thing like this:

\- Spy for Country X picks up intelligence that Country Y is about to do crazy
thing A. This information is 100% true and correct.

\- Country Y is not in the habit of doing crazy things like A.

\- Given that, the government of Country X thinks "This must be false because
country Y would NEVER do such a thing."

\- Country Y then goes and does thing A.

There are MANY instances of this throughout the history of intelligence
services and I always think of this type of scenario every time I hear "well
spies are just terrible."

~~~
carapace
Weren't the plans for Operation Market Garden discovered by the Germans in a
crashed plane and ignored? Something like that.

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

~~~
int_19h
The biggest one of those was Stalin's refusal to believe that Germans would
attack the USSR, even when it was so imminent that all alarms were going off
(and duly reported to him as such).

------
FerretFred
The more I see headlines like _The Suspect was known to the Secret Services ",
and, "The Suspect was on the Authorities' radar and deemed of no interest"_,
the more I believe our spies are dumber than they'd admit. Either that or
they, and the Government have a different agenda.

------
kwhitefoot
Did anyone ever seriously believe that spies in general know what they are
doing?

It seems unlikely that such groups of people would necessarily be better
organized than any other well financed group of people (such as a major
industrial concern) especially when you consider that much of what they must
do has to be done in the dark and is difficult to verify.

Plus of course you have the problem that a lot of what they do know how to do
only exists because of the existence of their counterparts in the opposing
country and has nothing to do with actual intelligence gathering but rather is
about competition and conflict between agencies both between and within
counties and alliances.

------
YeGoblynQueenne
It's still going on:

 _Fourteen-year-old boy charged with plotting terror attack_

[https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jun/17/fourteen-
yea...](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jun/17/fourteen-year-old-boy-
charged-with-plotting-terror-attack)

[Alice in wonderland is secret code for a terror attack.]

 _Teenage girl found guilty of plotting terror attack in London_

 _> > Safaa and Rizlaine Boular discussed the attack in a coded conversation –
played to the court – about an Alice in Wonderland-themed party._

 _> > In a recording, Rizlaine Boular said she wanted to have “an English tea
party kind of thing, little tea cups, tea cakes and stuff”, and Safaa Boular
suggested an Alice in Wonderland theme, saying: “You can be the Mad Hatter
‘cause your hair’s crazy. You can have cucumber and butter sandwiches.”_

 _> > Around the same time, Dich and Rizlaine Boular travelled around various
landmarks in London, which was believed to be a reconnaissance of potential
targets. The following day, they went to a supermarket on Wandsworth Road and
purchased a packet of kitchen knives and a rucksack._

(...)

 _> > “This was without doubt a major investigation for the counter-terrorism
command working jointly with the security service,” said Dean Haydon, the
Met’s senior national coordinator for counter-terrorism._

 _> > “Not only because it involved a family with murderous intent, but
because it is the first all-female terrorist plot that’s been launched in the
UK related to Daesh [Isis].”_

[https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jun/04/teenage-
girl...](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jun/04/teenage-girl-boular-
guilty-plotting-terror-attack-london-british-museum)

[A columbine style attack is planned by teenagers aremed with a rucksack
containing stones, batteries, ~50g of screws and matches. And a bottle of Head
& Shoulders shampoo.]

 _Boys given 10 and 12 years for Columbine-style plot in Yorkshire_

 _> > Police spoke to both boys separately at home after the incident. Bolland
confirmed they “planned to go into school with a firearm in order to get rid
of those who had wronged them”, but Wyllie denied everything._

 _> > A month later, detectives seized the latter’s diary and found a rucksack
in his hideout containing a balaclava, a bag of screws, cable ties and a
bottle of flammable liquid. He told police he had the items so he could run
away with his girlfriend. He denied planning to kill her parents or pupils and
teachers at his school._

(...)

 _> > Prosecutors said North Yorkshire police did not respond adequately to
the threat until a specialist counter-terrorism team took over the
investigation a month later. Phil Cain, assistant chief constable, admitted
their investigation fell below standards and that a review had taken place._

[https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jul/20/two-boys-
giv...](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jul/20/two-boys-
given-10-and-12-years-for-columbine-style-attack-plot-yorkshire)

(The damning evidence: [https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jul/20/two-
boys-giv...](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jul/20/two-boys-
given-10-and-12-years-for-columbine-style-attack-plot-yorkshire#img-2))

[A terrorist assembles a terror kit containing a knife, a hammer and a suicide
note.]

Ordering Gunton, who suffers from an autism spectrum disorder, to be detained
at Her Majesty’s pleasure, the judge Mark Wall QC, told the former A-level
student: “The police found a rucksack in your room which contained a knife, a
hammer and what has been referred to as a suicide note or a martyrdom letter.
In the martyrdom letter you referred to yourself as a ‘soldier of Isis’.

“The letter was written in such terms that it was obviously to be found and
read after you had carried out a terrorist attack.”

The judge described the items found in the rucksack as a “terrorist’s kit” and
said it was clear from Instagram posts in English and Arabic that Gunton, who
lived on a farm, had planned to launch an attack.

[https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/02/teenager-
llo...](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/02/teenager-lloyd-gunton-
jailed-cardiff-pop-concert-terrorist-attack-plot)

------
dificilis
On a related note, was there someone working in US Intelligence whose job it
was to tell President Trump that possibly the WHO's early statement on human-
human transmission of the "new coronavirus" depended on information from
China, and maybe that information from China wasn't correct, because, you
know, you can't always trust everything that the Chinese government says?

~~~
ciarannolan
I suspect that the intelligence community hides a good deal from him, for good
reason.

------
ajayh
To be a contrarian, don't forget Adam Curtis went to Oxbridge. Maybe he got
turned down by MI5.

------
jimbob45
I mean the FBI thought it would be a good idea to persuade MLK to kill himself
over his adultery. Moral quandaries aside, that is a remarkably stupid plan if
you’re looking to cripple the civil rights movement. Best case scenario, he
does it and everyone immediately suspects the FBI/CIA forever.

------
giardini
It's a lot worse than the title claims: almost NO experts ANYWHERE in
government are good at their jobs. And it isn't limited to governments of
course.

The book "Wrong: Why Experts* Keep Failing Us" by David H. Freedman shows that
government, academic and private industry are quite lacking in "expertise".
The current pandemic cock-ups with the CDC, "epidemiology experts", reporters,
commentators, analysts and political appointees all now make sense.

Freedman doesn't have a solution, instead leaving us with "11 Simple Never-
Fail Rules For Not Being Misled by Experts". but the situation laid out does
suggest that we (taxpayers) should slash funding for _most_ governmental,
academic and private agencies b/c they fail to come through and literally lack
expertise.

"No lesson seems to be so deeply inoculated by the experience of life as that
you never should trust experts."

\- Lord Salisbury

~~~
ciarannolan
>[...] almost NO experts ANYWHERE in government are good at their jobs.

Doctors at the NIH, scientists at the Department of Energy, biologists at
USAMRIID, etc etc etc.

All bad at their jobs? What kind of absurd reductionist take is this?

~~~
giardini
Then take a look at "I Quit" at:

[https://medium.com/@jamesheathers/i-quit-
be062295f638](https://medium.com/@jamesheathers/i-quit-be062295f638)

