(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?