An intelligence service is a mill that grinds 24/7, all year around. The orders are given by the civilian or military leadership: it has to gather and forward up-to-date, reliable and relevant information to aid the planning and decision-making at the highest levels.
The gatherers of intelligence should forward hard facts only – it is not their job to present speculation, guesswork, interpretation, or recommendation. Only the leadership that commissions the information is responsible for analysis and decisions.
Ideally this is true, but not always in real life. Intelligence officers, or spies, can leave some facts untold or present wrong or non-verified information. Sometimes they may be tempted to lie, exaggerate, or copy the information from public sources, such as newspapers. Or, they may try too hard, which can lead to their unveiling and getting caught.
On the other hand, even the best intelligence will not sway a leader who is not prepared to heed it. Stalin, probably more than any other world leader at the time, used intelligence information only to strengthen his own preconceptions and dismissed facts that were in conflict with them.
In 1941, he received, in advance, from several sources, good information, scores of warnings about the imminent German attack, Operation Barbarossa, from Helsinki, even the exact day of the assault. To him it was only disinformation.
Shaun Walker writes in his book The Illegals that in Stalin’s system there was nobody left who would be courageous enough or stupid enough to express even the slightest dissent when the great Leader was wrong.
For an intelligence officer, fear of the superior and willingness to please him are deadly sins. In a country governed by an authoritarian leader, presenting unpleasant information is difficult. Often the officers avoid providing bad news because it may be fateful for the messenger himself.
Currently, the nuclear superpowers, USA and Russia, both have regimes based, above all, on mistrust. In both countries, the highest leadership does not get objective information for decision making because they have shut themselves in a hermetical bubble of terrified, lying flatterers.
The new president, Donald Trump, almost at the outset of his presidency, purged the American national security apparatus. The officers had to swear allegiance to the Chief.
Trump has made it clear that he does not fully trust his new intelligence chiefs either. He seems to trust the Russian president more than them. This has already eroded the morale of the security services.
As the intelligence historian, Tim Weiner writes: Trump is now surrounded by incompetent, inexperienced, stupid “boot lickers”. “He has put the national security instruments in [the] hands of crackpots and fools.” The Nobel laureate, Paul Krugman recently stated that Trump has lost touch with reality and is slipping into “a world of delusions”.
There were problems of trust earlier as well. For example, six months before the 9/11 attack, the CIA director George Tenet tried to convince president G. W. Bush about the looming threat of Islamic ultra-fundamentalism. No one in the administration listened.
What about the war in Ukraine? How could Vladimir Putin, a president with intelligence service background, commit such a colossal strategic mistake, attacking with full military force in 2022? (True, the West erred too, believing that the Ukrainian resistance would hold a few days only.)
The decision to attack was made in a very small circle of Putin’s yes-men. Even all government ministers did not know about it. There was nobody to express doubts or ask uncomfortable questions.
Putin and his secret service seemed to be in some kind of hubris, because many international operations had gone so well, according to plans. It was a surprise that real war followed; Putin had thought that it would be a “special operation” only.
Putin dismissed a mountain of evidence that did not fit his world view; what followed was a gigantic failure of intelligence (Shaun Walker).
The groundwork for the attack was given to the interior service FSB. Lots of money and scores of agents were sent to Ukraine – with zero results. In a corrupt society like Russia, the intelligence service is also corrupt.
The Ukrainian case can be compared to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. The U.S. Secretary of State was sent to the UN to present concocted evidence to justify the attack. According to this incorrect and faulty intelligence, Saddam Hussein secretly developed weapons of mass destruction (which was not true) and supported Al-Qaida terrorists (which was also not true), and Iraq and Iran formed an axis of evil (not true, they were adversaries).
The facts presented were of the type that pleased the President, and “the proof” was obtained by torture, which mostly does not produce solid information. George W. Bush later stated that the attack was his biggest mistake as President.
The Iraq war led to a long period of violence, chaos and streams of refugees, and to The War on Terrorism, which surpassed almost all other Western intelligence activity. It was a cruel awakening, when the West later realized that by concentrating on Islamic terrorism, it had for about twenty years neglected the potentially fatal threat of Russian and Chinese espionage.
