So the author joined the CIA in 1951 and "spent the next 24 years working with the Directorate of Operations." [1] That means that he probably participated in some of the disastrous covert operations of that era. [2] I don't know if that makes him a trustworthy authority on intelligence analysis.
Most of the CIA records have been released over the years, and any major operations have entered the public record by now. Dulles was also very keen to brag about his successes and intent to bury his failures.
The fact is that the CIA in that period was absolutely inept. It failed to build any significant intelligence networks in either the Soviet Union or China, mispredicted critical events such as China's entrance into the Korean War, and squandered thousands of lives by attempting to parachute them into Eastern Europe, China, or North Korea to meet up with fictitious resistance forces. The CIA itself and its intelligence sources were routinely comprised by the Soviets and fed false information to the President.
The two "successful" operations of the era (Iran and Guatemala) replaced democratically elected leaders with brutal authoritarian regimes, and both of them barely succeeded though an embarrassing comedy of errors.
Was any intelligence agency of the era not incompetent? The GP's assertion of:
> I don't know if that makes him a trustworthy authority on intelligence analysis.
...only really applies if there is someone who is a "trustworthy authority on intelligence analysis."
If everyone is just flailing around, then we may as well listen to the experiences of a person who's been flailing around for the longest time. At least they've made a lot of mistakes you can learn from.
GRU and KGB first directorate. Also Soviet counter intel was orders of magnitude better, it helps when you can roundup anyone you want and brutalize anyone you want any time you want.
Western intel agencies were like children playing against professionals.
Another example is Mossad orders go magnitude better. Can you imagine Americans, British or hell anyone really pulling off Spring of Youth? Consider the depth of intel needed to pull something like that off. Obviously the Yom Kippur war will be mentioned.. thing was warning were passed to Golda Meir.. Israel should have mobilized and struck first but political decision was made it was not really fault of intel.
> The fact is that the CIA in that period was absolutely inept. It failed to build any significant intelligence networks in either the Soviet Union or China, mispredicted critical events such as China's entrance into the Korean War
I think that’s mostly because the CIA is focusing on analyzing what I believe is mostly meaningless information about its “adversaries” instead of doing their best to try and get the best information there is, even from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.
More to the point, I’m thinking about medieval Venice which I see as the “master of them all” when it comes to collecting meaningful intelligence. When they wanted to know if some other medieval entity was about to enter war against the Turks or not (the Turks had become their greatest foe) they were actually sending some Venice merchant (or at least that was his official guise) to actually live at the ruler’s court of that medieval entity and hear directly from that ruler’s mouth what his intentions were. Venice even had people in Istanbul itself which were often seen at the Sultan’s or the Grand Vizier’s court in order to try and understand what the Turks’ intentions were. Back to the CIA and China, they should have had their men at Mao’s “court” if they really had wanted to know his intentions. They didn’t because they probably couldn’t so that they tried instead to guess his intentions by over-analyzing what Mao and his people decided to publish through Chinese propaganda channels.
> any major operations have entered the public record by now.
Not even close to true. There are still Tibetan, Cuban, Southeast Asian, and South American ops that are still highly classified. A considerable number of nuclear-related operations are also unknown to the public.
As far as “Democratically elected leaders,” that is subject to debate given the breadth and depth of Soviet operations at the time, especially Department A of the First Chief Directorate. Even the Palestinian “situation” was primarily created with Soviet sponsorship to destabilize America’s chief ally in the region.
The history of CIA goes far beyond the sophomoric understanding of many of its detractors. Definitely not angels, but it’s a far more nuanced history, much of it untold.
There are probably few organizations that are as consistently wrong as the CIA throughout its history. They've missed basically every significant event that happened in the post-war era, and often famously predicted the opposite. No less true in recent history - the Berlin Wall, 9/11, the Iraq War, the Arab Spring - the list of failures is constant and spectacular. This is unsurprising, since the main feature that produces good results for any analytical group - accountability - is notoriously absent for the CIA. Let's NOT learn methodology from this organization.
astazangasta says>"There are probably few organizations that are as consistently wrong as the CIA throughout its history. They've missed basically every significant event that happened in the post-war era, and often famously predicted the opposite."
So the CIA is about as good as mainstream economists, then?
Not the OP, but they probably genuinely thought that it would lead to a democratization of the Middle East and North Africa the same as it had happened to Eastern Europe after 1989. Instead we got ISIS and the cluster-f*ck of war-lords that is current Lybia.
If anything, I'd imagine participating in an intelligence operation that failed terribly would make one more of a trustworthy authority than not, unless no new lessons were learned.
I expect authorities in most (actively practiced) subjects to have experienced a major failure or few, let alone a subject as involved as IA can be.
"Some of CIA's best analysts developed their skills as a consequence of experiencing analytical failure early in their careers. Failure motivated them to be more self-conscious about how they do analysis and to sharpen their thinking process". From the article.
Intelligence operations are extremely high risk. Failure of an operation does not mean the ideas behind it were incorrect. For example, the analysis was correct but the execution botched. There's many moving pieces here and it's a huge leap to discount the writer purely based on that.
> Failure of an operation does not mean the ideas behind it were incorrect.
Who's talking about failure?
> the analysis was correct but the execution botched
Are you willing to say this about all items on this page from 1951 - 1975? I haven't looked at it in-depth, but here's literally the first thing I scrolled onto, Bolivia 1971
> The U.S. government supported the 1971 coup led by General Hugo Banzer that toppled President Juan José Torres of Bolivia. Torres had displeased Washington by convening an "Asamblea del Pueblo" (People's Assembly or Popular Assembly), in which representatives of specific proletarian sectors of society were represented (miners, unionized teachers, students, peasants), and more generally by leading the country in what was perceived as a left wing direction. Banzer hatched a bloody military uprising starting on August 18, 1971 that succeeded in taking the reigns of power by August 22, 1971. After Banzer took power, the U.S. provided extensive military and other aid to the Banzer dictatorship as Banzer cracked down on freedom of speech and dissent, tortured thousands, "disappeared" and murdered hundreds, and closed labor unions and the universities. Torres, who had fled Bolivia, was kidnapped and assassinated in 1976 as part of Operation Condor, the US-supported campaign of political repression and state terrorism by South American right-wing dictators.
Yes, that doesn't invalidate everything he writes, of course. It just means he leaves all the stuff out that a person capable of being complicit in such things cannot be able to do, so it should absolutely be taken with a huge grain of salt, like dating advice from someone who might be a highly intelligent and charming sociopath.
"Botched execution", that's like saying a robbery was just the attempt to give a person a hug gone wrong. Yeah, maybe they didn't want to end up shooting the whole family including the children and a bunch of bystanders, maybe they "just" wanted to kill the father, knock the mother out, and run away with the purse. That's the "mistakes" they're making, it's a very vulgar euphemism in light of what it describes.
From what you quoted this looks like a reasonably executed operation. I don't see any blatant failures here. You might disagree with the goals and outcomes, but I expect the result was close to what US government expected (pro-US power, weakened region). US supports US interests, that's basically the only criteria and always was. Don't conflate actual goals with the justifications (human rights, freedom of speech, etc) government uses to convince own population.
> You might disagree with the goals and outcomes, but
...they don't? Yes, naturally, or they wouldn't be doing that stuff. And you might disagree with my assessment, but I don't, that's why I made it.
> US supports US interests
That's a abstraction so simplified it says nothing at all.
> pro-US power, weakened region
There's a lot of murdered people included in that. Regions don't get weakened, people get killed. Euphemisms are a powerful drug.
> Don't conflate actual goals with the justifications (human rights, freedom of speech, etc) government uses to convince own population.
I simply "disagree with their goals" (like I "disagree with the goals of Adolf Hitler"), not because they lie about them. (on the topic of thinking, not having several "truths" to keep track of really helps with that)
There is a reason these things are used as justifications in the exactly the same way a scammer will talk about gain and not loss. The fact that the scammer actually intends to scam doesn't make it any better. That they don't actually WANT to do anything good makes it worse.
If the US population the US government derives its sole legitimation from knew half of what is done in their name, to serve very, very narrow interests within the US, not theirs, they would be furious.
You're conflating all of that under "US supporting US interests", and for that end, the US has to lie to itself.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richards_Heuer
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...