Are spies more trouble than they're worth?

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/02/are-spies-more-trouble-than-theyre-worth

by bookofjoe • 7 years ago

124 119 7 years ago

newyorker.com

clavalle• 7 years ago

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.

jdm22125• 7 years ago

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.

corodra3• 7 years ago

Similar to no one talks about when the air force lands planes successfully, which it does thousands of times daily in peacetime. Even more in wartime. But when there's a crash, "Is the Air Force unable to properly fly planes?"

whatshisface4• 7 years ago

But one happens much more often than the other.

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

Nasrudith• 7 years ago

That "bias" is appropriate because of actual cost va value! "I killed five people and their families are out to kill you but your salary is 10% higher!" isn't worth it even to a sociopath from the expenses. If their gains are small and their fuckups are large not getting rid of them is itself an immense fuck up.

UI_at_80x24• 7 years ago

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.

jdm22125• 7 years ago

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• 7 years ago

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.

wahern2• 7 years ago

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.

pitt1980• 7 years ago

yeah, obtaining data, and correctly contextualizing it are different skill sets

you need both

webwielder2• 7 years ago

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.

nostrademons5• 7 years ago

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• 7 years ago

How did you verify they were stunningly inaccurate?

nickik3• 7 years ago

I can't like to anything but reading multiple related to US regime change it seems that often the local CIA operatives understand many of the problems and predict more or less the outcome, or at least that it will not go as the higher up things.

In many of those cases that person gets replaced by somebody more eager to execute the high level demand.

meowface3• 7 years ago

To flip the question: can you show any that were inaccurate, other than the Iraq WMD stuff? One major fuckup doesn't necessarily mean everything before and after should be discredited.

ianlevesque• 7 years ago

I think the problem with that is that the incentives wouldn't be there to act in the interests of the public on an ongoing basis. How effective that is under the current system is up for debate, but it's not a trivial matter. Ideally the people would care enough to elect someone that respects expertise and experience.

mnbvkhgvmj2• 7 years ago

Can you give some examples?

mlb_hn2• 7 years ago

They've definitely gotten things very wrong, e.g. in 1989 Howard Schaffer, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia, testified to Congress "“We’re confident that [the Pakistani supported Afghan Government] will be neither communist nor messianic Islamic” [1]. Then Pakistan helped the Taliban seize power in the ensuing civil war.

[1] U.S. Congress. House Committee on Foreign Affairs. (1989). Developments In Afghanistan And Their Implications For U.S. Policy. Congressional Hearing, Feb. 21, June 14, 1989.

hanniabu• 7 years ago

I think a lot of this has to do with what it means to be a leader. You have the final say but you also have the responsibility to listen to your peers and use information provided. Many of our representatives aren't leaders. I know many here like to start out of politics, but case in point is Trump with his climate change denial rhetoric, constantly ignoring military advisors and tweeting on a whim without any consultation, and moving forward with various deals that advisors are recommending against.

neonate• 7 years ago

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...

yters4• 7 years ago

80/20 rule probably applies to every job.

krustyburger• 7 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution

bryanrasmussen2• 7 years ago

The whole thing sounds pretty damning until one considers that Enigma was in the end an intelligence operation to place things in perspective.

Millennium• 7 years ago

In this case I'd say it's more like 99/1, only even more so, to the point where using numbers doesn't even make sense. Spies are way more trouble than they're worth, except when they're not. But when they are not, they're worth literally everything.

mlb_hn2• 7 years ago

The US Army had previously pointed out a similar issue to the BBC article, where a lack of internal guidance and oversight was leading to analysis and collection of non-optimal data [1]. Just like in academia, there seems to be a bit of a tension in getting to useful predictive insights to issues.

[1] http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/Afghanistan...

Nimitz14• 7 years ago

Oh my god the incompetence is outrageous. Thank you for posting. Le Carre's mocking of the American counterparts doesn't seem fair in light of this. Or maybe his point was at least the Brits were so incompetent they didn't really do that much in the end!

otakucode• 7 years ago

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.

smsm422• 7 years ago

led to him becoming a double agent for the KGB

So some spied did some efficient work, apparently, just not the CIA ones.

Ascendency• 7 years ago

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.

C1sc0cat2• 7 years ago

Sorry the USA did not have many spies in Moscow it was insanely difficult to run anyone.

and quoting "Aldritch Aimes" is a bit like quoting Kim Philby

fit2rule• 7 years ago

The time is long since past for the CIA to be disbanded. It was staffed with ex-Nazi's who used its secrecy as a fortress within which to build their own new reich, and this is the #1 cause of turmoil and strife in the world today.

When you PAY someone to generate reports of bad news and non-optimum situations, they will generate bad news and non-optimum situations - and then report on it (accurately or otherwise).

When you allow those same people to keep everything they do a secret, for the sake of 'national security', everything they do will be for the sake of 'national security' and therefore kept a dire secret. This includes their own war crimes and other crimes against humanity - as we have seen time and time again with the CIA and its military-pharmaceutical-industrial super-state, which rules us all through fear and coercion whether we like it or not.

paggle• 7 years ago

Reminds me of the article “Maybe today’s Navy is just not very good at driving ships”

https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2017/08/27/navy-swo...

cm2187• 7 years ago

France had its own fair share of embarrassing secret service blunders. Many are described in an excellent documentary [1].

For instance when New Zealand arrested the DGSE agents who sunk the Rainbow Warrior, the agents gave them the phone numbers of their “relatives” as part of their cover story. Instead of calling the numbers, the New Zealand police called their french counterpart to do a reverse lookup on the numbers, and the French police responded that the numbers belong to the DGSE...

One of the biggest success of French secret services is Farewell, the code name for a Soviet officer providing valuable intelligence to the DST. Based on this intelligence, France expelled Russian agents. The Russian ambassador protested to the French foreign minister, who showed him some stolen document to prove that France was well informed. Having seen what document had been stolen, it didn’t take long to the Russians to identify the source and execute him.

Or in the 80s in Lebanon. A huge explosion killed dozens of French UN soldiers. France suspected Iran was behind the attack and decided to respond in kind. They left a jeep loaded with explosives in front of the Iranian embassy but the bomb didn’t explode. They then tried to shoot on the jeep to make it explode, no luck. It didn’t take long to the Iranian to find who purchased the jeep...

[1] first part (the others must be on youtube too): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JQijy9P7M_4

w1nst0nsm1th• 7 years ago

Reminds "Bons Baisers de Hong Kong" (which could be translated as "From Hong Kong With Love"), a parody of Bond movies...

Souvenirs, souvenirs...

goatinaboat• 7 years ago

That is the enduring appeal of James Bond movies - the comforting fantasy that the spy agencies are competent

im3w1l• 7 years ago

The world has changed a lot, and quickly. I imagine not too long ago, just having someone in another country, hanging out in cafes reading newspapers and making small talk with the other people there could have brought a lot of info. Info which we take for granted now.

AcerbicZero• 7 years ago

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• 7 years ago

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.

smsm422• 7 years ago

https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/

paganel2• 7 years ago

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...

DenisM• 7 years ago

“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.

mamon• 7 years ago

From what I learned in history classes in high school, Stalin ignored news about possible German invasion, because Red Army had already been gathering troops at the border, planning to invade Germany. Hitler forestalled him by just a few weeks.

rurp• 7 years ago

It's been a while since I studied this but if I remember correctly Hitler strongly suspected Stalin would turn on him in the next year or two, once Russia had mobilized a larger army. Hitler's decision to launch a surprise assault wasn't so much hubris as it was a strategic choice between several tough options.

busterarm• 7 years ago

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.

hyperion2010• 7 years ago

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.

markus_zhang• 7 years ago

i think in todays world humanint is often overlooked. but sigint does take care most of the stuffs.

RaptorJ• 7 years ago

Considering all the "good" the Dulles brothers did for the world, maybe this is for the best.

lifeisstillgood• 7 years ago

>> 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• 7 years ago

Probably a reference to this: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/20/world/asia/china-cia-spie...

ackbar03• 7 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17771096

This was pretty big

VxfnhTAJ• 7 years ago

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."

secfirstmd4• 7 years ago

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.

yters4• 7 years ago

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• 7 years ago

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.

yters4• 7 years ago

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

jdm22125• 7 years ago

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...

secfirstmd4• 7 years ago

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.

Animats2• 7 years ago

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

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

erentz• 7 years ago

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.

caycep• 7 years ago

A couple of Eisenhower biographies goes along w/ this. He was well aware of all the machinations amongst different players, including defense industry players collaborating w/ politicians to sound warning drums, to Allen Dulles and his coterie manipulating policy for who knows what.

Apparently the best source of intel were RB-47 and U2 overflights. Ike knew, going into negotiations w/ Khruschev, just how weak the USSR's hand was.

Symmetry• 7 years ago

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.

Animats2• 7 years ago

Ref to history of special operations: [1] Available as a book, but here's the original thesis at the Naval Postgraduate School. The author was a Navy SEAL, later headed the Joint Special Operations Command and became a U.S. Navy admiral. So he knows what he's talking about.

[1] https://www.afsoc.af.mil/Portals/86/documents/history/AFD-05...

dfc• 7 years ago

Why don't you just say his name? It's McRaven.

hutzlibu3• 7 years ago

But it seems, that Entebbe was mostly a success, because of sheer luck and incompetence (and moral hesitation to actual kill hostages) on the terrorist side. (They could land planes full of soldiors, without the ugandians noticing, they failed to kill sentrys with supressed fire, they killed hostages because the soldiers did not know how the hijackers looked like. And the ugandian army could have been prepared, if they would not have ignired the intel they recieved about the raid)

Still, a success ...

ourmandave• 7 years ago

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

meowface3• 7 years ago

(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?

nickik3• 7 years ago

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.

nickik3• 7 years ago

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.

logjammin2• 7 years ago

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 fd 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.

logjammin2• 7 years ago

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?

tsss• 7 years ago

It's hackernews... Many people here seem to totally lack any sort of reasonable scepsis when it comes to authorities.

joewee• 7 years ago

Great read.

vectorEQ2• 7 years ago

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.

hutzlibu3• 7 years ago

"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.

vectorEQ2• 7 years ago

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... (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...)

boomboomsubban4• 7 years ago

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

What about all the crime/terrorism they themselves have enabled in foreign countries. Why is our society worth ruining others?

And maybe these spies do end up doing some good, but their failures have led to millions of deaths. They also aren't shy about boasting over their successes, do I find it hard to believe their successful yet secret work can atone for that.

saiya-jin• 7 years ago

the evilness / incompetence etc. etc. is by far overestimated by the public

Yeah nice talk and all, but whenever some clusterfuck permeates to the public its such an epic fail on many levels that often shows utter incompetence... coming from people who shouldn't fail like that.

I wish secret services around the world would be those nice good guys guarding freedom, being just, highly competent etc. But reality is simply not like that. Either the folks are semi-incompetent and drowning in politics and chasing money and careers more than actual job they should do, or those highly competent are often cold-blood murderers who couldn't care less whom they kill (ie mosad guys). And I don't even go into topic of all of them desperately wanting to know every private detail of every single person on the globe, because 'security'.

I used to expect more from them. But that naivety was lost along the road long time ago.

jonathanstrange• 7 years ago

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...

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

[1] https://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/bnd-bildband-ueber-zentra...

Are spies more trouble than they're worth?

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