All intelligence agencies fail, often spectacularly. The Central Intelligence Agency’s faulty assessments of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program before the Iraq war, the German intelligence service’s conviction that Russian President Vladimir Putin was bluffing about invading Ukraine, all three Russian intelligence services’ certainty that Ukrainian forces would quickly fold—failure is the price of admission in a profession that must anticipate what a foreign actor will do based on information that is hidden, incomplete, flawed, and sometimes deceptive.
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