My monthly book reading: A failure of intelligence

“Beware the ides of March.”

It’s one of Shakespeare’s most enduring lines, and a good reminder how flawed intelligence networks can be. From Julius Caesar to the Kremlin, the most powerful courts in history have struggled to master human intelligence. Even in the 2020s, with artificial intelligence all around us, human intelligence remains, well, human.

That was one of my takeaways from this month’s reading list, which was topped by The Quiet Americans, an excellent account of the CIA’s early years.

The Central Intelligence Agency grew from the ashes of the Second World War, when Washington realized it would need an independent and well-resourced agency to counter the Soviet Union’s vastly superior spy systems.

Journalist Scott Anderson tells the CIA’s origin story through the lives of four agents and their operations in, among other hot spots, East Germany, Guatemala, the Philippines and Vietnam. The stories are the stuff of Hollywood plot lines — quite literally, as one of the agents spent time as a script consultant to create the soft propaganda.

The book also provides an excellent lens on the late 1940s and ‘50s, when the world was actually in a more precarious state than it is today. Here’s some of what I took away on the art and science of intelligence, no matter where it’s used:

1. All intelligence is biased

The Soviets proved to be excellent at coercive intelligence, effectively creating snitch states in which everyone from the local barber to school teachers were agents of some kind. That was incredibly powerful — to a degree. Societies, like individuals, see what they want to see, as the Soviet spy state discovered in the 1956 Hungarian uprising

The Americans faced a different set of biases. The first generation of CIA champions saw themselves as “white hats” taking on communism — a spirit that only grew during the McCarthyite attacks on communism in the 1950s. And so, from Eisenhower’s White House to the CIA men out in the jungles of Vietnam, a generation of Americans saw what they wanted — and missed what became blindingly obvious.

2. All intelligence is political

It’s fascinating to read how many good intel reports get lost in translation at headquarters, or shuffled into a dusty pile. Sometimes it’s orders from on high. More often it’s the work of mid-level deskers gaming the system, our competing groups and agencies serving their own agenda.

3. Propaganda is everywhere

The Soviets had been practicing propaganda for decades by the time the Cold War got underway but they weren’t quite ready for prime time. The CIA used the mass media revolution of the ‘50s, including television, radio and telephones, to flood the airwaves with torqued torrents of news, images and ideas. Even when it wasn’t always right, or on the level, Radio Free Europe was as influential as the B52 in containing communism.

4. Technology needs humans

Interpreting intelligence is as critical as gathering it, and just as tricky. Even when the Americans were on to something, they often lacked the cultural and social awareness to go with all the other signals around them. It didn’t matter how much better the technology of intel gathering became in the ‘50s, cultural intel was often overlooked. How the CIA misread Ho Chi Minh will be studied for centuries.

5. Creative destruction remains the American superpower

The book clings to that classic American narrative of heroes in the field up against the idiots of Washington. It also leaves us with the impression the CIA was a failure, set up from the earliest days to be the fall guy. As the old saying goes, intelligence successes can never be told, so failures prevail. But there’s enough successes in the book to see how the CIA did grow to become the world’s pre-eminent spy agency and one that, failures notwithstanding, still helps keep the world from tipping, or if you prefer, tipping away from American control. One reason: The U.S. embraces its failures, learns from them and continues to innovate. It’s a different kind of intelligence — and often the most powerful.