Our clueless spies

[CHIMO]

Put aside, for a moment, the long-running question of whether Osama bin Laden is alive or dead. The finest intelligence services in the world have been spending zillions of dollars trying to answer that for over a decade now, and they still haven't a clue. Instead, they discovered Curveball, who fed them a tall tale of mass destruction. Add his wild Saddam yarns to the library of the absurd.

I first opened that library door in 1989 when, a few weeks before the Wall came down, I went to visit Her Majesty's ambassador in East Berlin. We discussed the strains on the regime – but never, at any time, was there even a private hint of incipient collapse. What happened was as big a surprise to our man with his ear to the ground as it was to everyone else. And sheer, stupefied surprise runs through every chapter of emerging cold war history now.

What did President Reagan note in his diary on 18 November 1983? "I feel the Soviets … are so paranoid about being attacked that … we ought to tell them no one here has any intention of doing anything like that." Why, on 18 January 1984, did the KGB instruct its agents in Europe and the US to look out for "mass slaughter of cattle and putting meat into cold storage"? And how did the then deputy director of the CIA (and today's US defence secretary) Robert Gates come to wonder whether "the Soviet leadership was so out of touch that they really believed a pre-emptive attack was a real possibility?" (His own answer: "US intelligence had failed to grasp the true extent of their anxiety.")

Those quotes – rehearsed in The Dead Hand by David E Hoffman – are only the tip of an iceberg of bumbling risk assessment through the 60s, 70s and 80s on both sides of the iron curtain, fermented by painfully frail espionage efforts. The CIA got it wrong time and again. It didn't – as Reagan's own musings reveal – have a single lead agent inside the Kremlin who knew what was going on.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/feb/20/cockups-secrecy-cia-kgb-curveball

[jakeXT]

1. British Fooled Hitler With `Operation Mincemeat': Lewis Lapham

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-08-13/british-fooled-hitler-with-operation-mincemeat-lewis-lapham.html


I listened to this podcast recently and the author mentioned that only Goebbels didn't buy the story.

In the intelligence world, you'll never know what is black and white or up and down.