from Fred Reed
"American intel has never been much good. Reflect. In 1941 tensions were high with Japan, which was known to have a large, modern fleet and better pilots with better airplanes than ours. On December 7, naval intelligence hadn’t bothered to know where that fleet was—with disastrous results.
In 1950 in Korea, signs of an upcoming attack were thick on the ground, but US intelligence didn’t notice—with disastrous results. Nor did it notice when the PLA was about to enter the war—with disastrous results.
As noted above, in 1959 the CIA made a complete botch of the attack on Cuba. Again: the Children’s Agency thought that the Cubans would rise against Castro. The results were politically disastrous.
In 1961, the U2 got shot down over Russia. It was not up to the CIA’s standards of catastrophe, being merely embarrassing. I suppose it is too much to expect perfect consistency.
In 1975 came the adventure of the Glomar Explorer, in which the CIA wasted a half a billion green ones, which was money in those days, in secret communion with a totally lunatic Howard Hughes, to fail to retrieve most of an ancient Soviet submarine that the Navy didn’t want.
In 1967 the Israelis attacked the spy ship Liberty and killed 142 sailors, because the intelligence community was too stupid to protect its ships. In 1968 the North Koreans grabbed the spy ship Pueblo, whose highly trained crew didn’t manage to destroy their secret thingamawhatsses, because the intel community was too stupid to protect its ships. In 2007 the Chinese forced down an NSA spy plane, which, as usual, didn’t destroy its secrets.
Vietnam. Here we have another example of the intelligence geek’s consistent inability to do what should be a primary duty: to tell the government the likely consequences of a given policy—with disastrous consequences. Washington blundered into that war with no idea that the Viets might fight, that the war might cost a decade, 60,000 dead soldiers, and eventually be lost. Had Langley and Meade not read Bernard Fall, or heard of Dien Bien Phu?
During Vietnam, there was the Son Tay raid. Son Tay was a suburb of Hanoi where a large number of American prisoners were held. The military made a brilliant raid that would have gotten them out, except that intel hadn’t noticed that the prisoners had been moved to another location. For the prisoners the results were disastrous, since they would not get another chance.
But the supreme contribution of the spookoweeners to that war was to be taken utterly by surprise by Tet, the queen-sacrifice move that lost the war for the US. Disastrouser and disastrouser.
In the Yugoslavian mess, the US managed to bomb the Chinese embassy in Belgrade because it didn’t know where it was. Gilbert and Sullivan. Check the telephone book, maybe?
The spooks were astonished when the Berlin Wall went up, and again when it came down. They did not predict the collapse of the Soviet Union, their principal object of study. What do these guys do all day?
They did not detect the pack of Saudis who dropped those towers in New York—with disastrous results. Nor had they detected the earlier attempt on the towers with a truck bomb.
Iraq? Again, they had no idea how Arabs might react. I guess they had never heard of Israel and the Palestinians. They figured it would be a walk in the park, with disastrous results.
They seem to have been equally clueless, or maybe just unable to overcome the Pentagon’s excessive estimation of itself, in the case of Afghanistan, again with disastrous results. Washington did not remotely suspect that it would get bogged down in a decade of a war, which it would probably lose. Maybe they hadn’t gotten around to reading about the Russians’ experience of Afghanistan."
http://www.fredoneverything.net/CIA.shtml
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