Intelligence: The god that failed
Manufacturing or cherry-picking evidence to ensure conformity to a specific vision is a temptation hard to resist
On October 22, 1963, US President John F. Kennedy invited the publisher of the New York Times for lunch. During the meal he suggested that the Times transfer its correspondent in South Vietnam, David Halberstam, to another posting.
Halberstam’s reporting indicated that the Saigon regime was losing the war against its communist Vietcong adversary. This contradicted the reports that Kennedy was getting from official American sources, which all claimed that the Saigon regime had the upper hand.
Teesta River Project: Should Bangladesh self-fund?
Read MoreHalberstam was not removed from his position, and Kennedy would have done well to pay more attention to his reporting. But the president did not, preferring to depend on official channels that provided him, one must assume, with the news that he wished to hear, namely that Saigon, Washington’s ally, was winning the war.
It was obvious that Halberstam as a journalist and a civilian did not have anywhere near the volume of first-hand knowledge that was available to the government. However, he had numerous sources within the American counter-insurgency community, operating at the grass roots level, who shared with him, albeit confidentially, their misgivings about how the war was progressing.
Those misgivings were available to the government but they were systematically disregarded both by the American military and by the American Embassy in Saigon. In other words, the intelligence collecting system at the grass root level worked.
What did not work was the processing of the information at the level of Saigon, be it by the American military or by the diplomats. Thus the onward communication to Washington of the conclusions to be drawn from this locally generated information was flawed.
The flawed information was uncritically received by the system in Washington and further fed to the political establilshment , which was only too happy to receive information that conformed to its vision of events in Vietnam.
If the assimilation by the ruling establishment of information that comes from parallel or unofficial sources or does not conform to the prevailing opinion is an issue in open societies, the problem is compounded tenfold when a one-party system or a one-man rule prevails. The most glaring example is Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union.
‘Shoot him. He lies.’
On June 22, 1941, Hitler launched operation Barbarossa, which was supposed to bring down the Soviet Union. The attack took Stalin by surprise but it did not have to be so. For weeks before the attack Stalin had been warned by a number of sources that Hitler was on the point of invading the Soviet Union. In the hours prior to the attack a German soldier crossed the lines to warn the Soviets of what was coming. His message was duly reported by radio to Moscow and the reply came immediately: “Shoot him. He lies.”
The reason for this reaction was simple. Stalin had decided that Hitler would attack in 1943 and no amount of contrary evidence would change the dictator’s mind. It got to the point where Soviet officials who dared to present him with contrary evidence were putting their lives at risk – with the result that they soon refrained from providing him with data that did not confirm to his preconceived vision. The result was that, when Hitler attacked, Stalin proved so unprepared that he came close to losing the Soviet Union.
From China’s intervention in the Korean war to the Tet 1968 0ffensive to Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, post-World War II history is paved with intelligence failures – with two caveats.
The first is that at the grass roots level the collection and processing of raw intelligence is an ongoing process, undertaken by most nations in order to address both domestic and international security concerns. This process mostly, when not interfered with, can produce actionable results albeit not necessarily in the public domain.
The second is that the proclivity of political establishments either to force-fit intelligence to conform to their preconceived visions of reality or to ignore geopolitical imperatives is well established. The end result is that intelligence is disregarded in the decision-making process with dire consequences. As of today the two book ends of this deficiency are Korea and Ukraine.
In the fall of 1950 the forces led by General McArthur had not only repulsed the North Korean assault on South Korea but had crossed the 38th parallel and were moving toward the Yalu river, which marked the border with China. This created major concern in Beijing, amplified by the fact that McArthur had indicated that he might consider using Chinese nationalist Kuomintang troops, brought in from Taiwan, to strengthen his hold on North Korea.
The result was that a conflict that developed in the Korean peninsula had now the potential of spreading and represented a direct danger to the Chinese state. Indeed, while the new communist leadership in Beijing could put up with an American military presence in South Korea, the 38th Parallel was a red line that could not be crossed. However, given the total breakdown of communications between China and the United States, there was no channel by which Beijing could convey its concern to Washington.
Unaware of Washington’s intentions and increasingly wary that the Americans might be tempted to cross the border into China and seek to overthrow the regime, the Chinese Communists started massing troops on the Yalu border.
For Washington the questions that should have been raised were two: at the strategic level, would China intervene; and at the tactical level, where and how. There is no evidence that these questions were ever raised.
The original goal of the UN intervention in Korea had been to thwart aggression. However, once general McArthur had decided that his forces would proceed beyond the 38th Parallel, China’s intervention in the conflict was a strategic given and the only question was how and where it would unfold.
There is no evidence that this conundrum was ever considered by the policy makers in Washington. Thus a strategic intelligence failure was compounded by a tactical one when, on November 1, 1951 some 350 000 Chinese troops caught the American forces by surprise and sent them reeling from the border areas.
Ukraine stands out today as the other bookend of intelligence failures. The Russian attack that started on February 24, 2022, took the form of an armored column headed for Kiev. Had the attack occurred 20 years earlier, one can reasonably assume that the Russian force would have reached its target in a matter of hours and imposed on Ukraine a pro-Russian government. But in twenty years Ukrainian nationalism had assumed a new dimension and fueled a resistance to the invasion that neither the Russians nor the friends of Ukraine had expected.
Compounding the problem for Putin was the state of the Russian army. Over the previous decade the Russian armed forces had gone through a massive modernization program. However, the level of corruption in the country was such that most of the funds directed to the military were diverted. The combination of an unexpected resistance and a non-performing army ensured that what should have been a 48-hour operation morphed into the present quagmire. And there are no indications that these two developments were ever factored in when President Putin decided on the use of force as regards Ukraine.
The reasons for this deficiency in factoring in reality can only be presumed but had it been considered it would have run counter to two of President’s Putin basic assumptions, namely that Ukraine was in substance Russian and that the reform of the Russian armed forces had been successfully implemented. Thus President Putin either was not presented with the intelligence that the situation demanded or he implicitly disregarded it because it ran contrary to his ideological bent.
The 70-year span between Korea and Ukraine is replete with strategic intelligence failures.
In April 1961 The United states engineered an invasion of Cuba by Cuban dissidents that was to lead to the collapse of the Castro regime. Predicated on the faulty assumption that Castro had no popular support, the invasion proved a dismal failure.
In October 1962 it was the turn of the Soviets to misjudge America’s resolve and try to position missiless in Cuba, a venture that brought the world close to a nuclear war.
The end of the Cold War did not substantially change the genetic makeup of intelligence. While tactical intelligence remains largely the realm of the technocrats, strategic intelligence is still very much hostage to the mindsets of governments. And as the issue of weapons of mass destruction and Iraq demonstrated, manufacturing or cherry picking evidence to ensure that it conforms to a specific vision of reality is a temptation difficult to resist.
Alexander Casella PhD has taught and he has worked as a journalist for Le Monde, The Times, The New York Times, Die Zeit, The Guardian and Swiss radio and TV, writing primarily on China and Vietnam. In 1973 he joined the UNHCR, serving, among other postingss, as head of the East Asia Section and director for Asia and Oceania. He then served as representative in Geneva of the International Center for Migration Policy Development.