The guy who wrote this is an ex-Chief of Station in the Middle East.
...The horrible truth is that 9/11 was not a failure to connect dots. It was a failure to collect the necessary dots in the first place. We were not running the sources we needed. We were not in fact doing much of anything to actually recruit those sources or collect the intelligence we required.
Osama Bin Laden had been telling us for years that he intended to take the fight to the “far enemy.” That was us. He had blown up two of our embassies. He had come perilously close to sinking a U.S Navy destroyer in Yemen. He wasn’t talking smack. He was deadly serious.
We knew all that. Everybody on the planet knew all that. And, yet, year after year, a creaking, Cold War relic of an intelligence bureaucracy did everything it could to stop us from collecting the necessary intelligence and pretend like espionage was still a “gentleman’s game.”...
It's not the first time we've heard that "HUMINT" (people on-the-ground) is sorely lacking in the CIA.
Now for a very, very, telling quote:
... We are in the middle of a war with Iran right now in which intelligence on the inner machinations of the Iranian regime is of critical importance. I can guarantee you, as can anybody else with any insight, that we know effectively nothing about what is happening at the senior levels in Tehran. The same goes for the actual status of the Iranian nuclear weapons program, or any other topic that is critical to our winning this war....
So what?
Here's what: a total lack of US intel operators in Iran means that the intel we do get comes from other parties, who may or may not share US interests.
Whether those 'other parties' are England, Pakistan, Turkey, or Israel is irrelevant. Each of them has their own twist--their own priorities--in mind.
Not our priorities. Theirs.


