11 ms·

Bugger: Maybe the real state secret is spies aren't good at their jobs (2013)

198 points by tjalfi 6y ago

tjalfi 6y ago
(submitter) This post was previously submitted in 2013[0][1] and 2017[2]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6184984 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6184984 - 102 comments [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6690913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6690913 - 11 comments [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14500633 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14500633 - 139 comments
throwaway1917 6y ago
It so happens that this story has since moved on slightly since it was last posted. Two years ago, Michael Bettaney died. I knew him briefly - after he got out of jail, he moved into small-group communist politics, where we crossed paths. The stuff about his incompetence as a spy is rather overstated. By the time I knew him, he certainly had a drink problem, which may for all I know have predated his long prison sentence (much of it in solitary). The truth is of course that MI5 was not the only intelligence agency with double agents and he was shopped by one such British KGB mole, Oleg Gerdievsky. One rather suspects that the fate of the cold war did not hang in the balance. The underlying point - that counterintelligence has very often proved to be a spectacular waste of human effort - stands, although that is hardly a reason to be insouciant about mass surveillance.
- tialaramex 6y ago
  > The underlying point - that counterintelligence has very often proved to be a spectacular waste of human effort - stands, although that is hardly a reason to be insouciant about mass surveillance. Mass surveillance causes significant problems regardless of whether intelligence works, and so not only does it make sense for the IETF to write that "Pervasive monitoring is an attack" but I believe that it's morally right for us to say that therefore we should demand our governments desist from such attacks. But that article takes a pretty typical Adam Curtis angle when it comes to facts that dismantle his core thesis - acknowledge them very briefly and then carry on as if they didn't exist. Double Cross is less than a hundred years ago and took place under the circumstance in which actual spies are more valuable - a war. It can and should continue to be held up as an example of how actually sometimes (in a war for example) there are enemy spies and turning or eliminating them can be significant. In the modern era we fight a lot of actions short of war. The most significant subsequent military action in the UK was the Falklands in 1982. But something like Double Cross would have been pointless. Britain did not go to war against Argentina. Argentina wasn't at with Britain. Both countries disagreed about the status of the Falklands, which the Argentinians had (for local political reasons) decided to just seize by force. Because this wasn't a war per se, our "intelligence" was mostly just a result of being friendly with the (similarly awful but not hostile to us) regime in neighbouring Chile. No James Bond types, just somebody who will turn a blind eye to human rights abuses and focus on immediate military intelligence resources.
  - 082349872349872 6y ago
    Körner, "The Pleasures of Counting" (1996), has a bit in "The Poles" (on breaking Enigma) that might shed some light on traditional tradecraft vs mass surveillance. (compare what the Stasi could accomplish with their non-automated labour-intensive methods) > Churchill's romantic soul loved the excitement and secrecy surrounding Bletchley. He relished the way that >> ... old procedures, like the setting up of agents, the suborning of informants, the sending of messages written in invisible ink, ... all turned out to be largely cover for this other source, as one might keep some old-established business in rare books going in order to be able, under cover of it, to do a thriving trade in pornography and erotica. 2nd level quote from Muggeridge, "Chronicles of Wasted Time" (1973) p139
  - Jon_Lowtek 6y ago
    Mass surveillance will causes even greater problems, if failings like the ones in the article keep happening, which is likely. Look at the MI5 arresting some students based on nothing but a list of different meaning, baseless assumptions and jumping to conclusions. Now imagine such data gathered on a massive scale and the process of bad decision making fully automated. Secret agencies close to the military building a paranoid delusional AI that searches for threats from humans. What could possibly go wrong?
vinceguidry 6y ago
If you think about it, it really shouldn't be surprising. James Bond and other spy movies have convinced us that the government just has endless amounts of money to throw at hard problems. But they don't. Even though the numbers involved are staggering, government departments fight tooth and nail for allocations. The cash you do get, you have to spend most of it on things that make your department look good rather than what will make you better at your job. Then there's plain ole' fraud, waste and abuse, trying to instill an ethic of frugality into someone who is in charge of more taxpayer money a month than they make in a year, well a lot of times that's just going to fall on deaf ears. Spy departments derive effectiveness mostly from having the ability to skirt the law rather than training or having better equipment. The government does have people that really know what they're doing. But their time and attention is limited, again mostly to projects that make their departments look good. As a result it's much easier than you'd think to get away with a lot more than you would think you could.
- Spooky23 6y ago
  I think that’s a common, but flawed outlook on it. Early in my career I worked for a social services department, a department that was constantly kicked around in the press for various “scandals”, incompetence, etc. It certainly wasn’t the most efficient organization that I’ve seen, but it was not much worse than fortune 100 companies that I’ve worked for or done business with. And For all of the woes, it was very good at what it did. Benefit payments were made, enrollments done, procurements procured, hearings adjudicated, audits completed. It’s easy to get caught up in the noise and determine that these organizations are incompetent and ineffective. The reality is that usually the machine of state is very good at what it does, but they measure many aspects of success with a different measure (compliance) than a company (profit).
  - dcolkitt 6y ago
    Systematic research using large datasets shows that public sector organizations are associated with significantly worse management practices.[1] Public sector organizations are nearly as poorly managed as the worse category of private sector firms: those run by the heirs of the original founder. In particular public sector organizations have significantly worse incentive structures, are much more likely to promote based on tenure rather than competence, and are much more likely to retain low performing employees. [1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w17850.pdf https://www.nber.org/papers/w17850.pdf
bscphil 6y ago
This is kind of a strange (though interesting) article. The headlining claim is that "spies aren't good at their jobs". But does the article support that? > The terrible truth that began to dawn in the 1980s was that MI5 - whose job it was to catch spies that threatened Britain - had never by its own devices caught a spy in its entire history. The whole article focuses on MI5, which I'm not really familiar with, and claims that their sole purpose is defensive, to catch spies, and not to spy on other countries. But almost by definition, if Soviet spies were left in high places for decades through the incompetence of MI5, doesn't that mean the Soviet spy agency had a pretty decent track record, either by luck, or by their competence in exploiting the specific weaknesses of MI5? I think it's more likely that the focus on defense is at fault, and not the focus on MI5 in particular. If you get a bunch of spies together, and task them with discovering other spies, then they'll probably find some people who may or may not be actual spies. The problem is in part that the base rate of spies is very low, but also that the people sent to spy in other countries for the most part seem to have kept a low profile (they didn't become head of MI5 or Prime Minister, for example), and also as the article states, that suspiciousness starts to crowd out your actual evidence. But get a bunch of spies together, and task them with gathering intelligence in other countries, and maybe they'll have a much better time of it, on average. At least, if this article provides me with a reason to think anything about this question, it makes me think that they typically were. So all in all it's a nice story, but it's not clear that the claim in the headline is warranted.
- duxup 6y ago
  >So all in all it's a nice story, but it's not clear that the claim in the headline is warranted. I feel like this is a trend. More and more articles and titles are only connected in the most general ways. Like you can expect most of the keywords to be there but not the meaning.
- coderintherye 6y ago
  They may have done well to source from "Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA" which provides more factual evidence to support the hypothesis.
  - 6y ago
YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
It's still going on: Fourteen-year-old boy charged with plotting terror attack https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jun/17/fourteen-year-old-boy-charged-with-plotting-terror-attack https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jun/17/fourteen-yea... [Alice in wonderland is secret code for a terror attack.] Teenage girl found guilty of plotting terror attack in London >> Safaa and Rizlaine Boular discussed the attack in a coded conversation – played to the court – about an Alice in Wonderland-themed party. >> In a recording, Rizlaine Boular said she wanted to have “an English tea party kind of thing, little tea cups, tea cakes and stuff”, and Safaa Boular suggested an Alice in Wonderland theme, saying: “You can be the Mad Hatter ‘cause your hair’s crazy. You can have cucumber and butter sandwiches.” >> Around the same time, Dich and Rizlaine Boular travelled around various landmarks in London, which was believed to be a reconnaissance of potential targets. The following day, they went to a supermarket on Wandsworth Road and purchased a packet of kitchen knives and a rucksack. (...) >> “This was without doubt a major investigation for the counter-terrorism command working jointly with the security service,” said Dean Haydon, the Met’s senior national coordinator for counter-terrorism. >> “Not only because it involved a family with murderous intent, but because it is the first all-female terrorist plot that’s been launched in the UK related to Daesh [Isis].” https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jun/04/teenage-girl-boular-guilty-plotting-terror-attack-london-british-museum https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jun/04/teenage-girl... [A columbine style attack is planned by teenagers aremed with a rucksack containing stones, batteries, ~50g of screws and matches. And a bottle of Head & Shoulders shampoo.] Boys given 10 and 12 years for Columbine-style plot in Yorkshire >> Police spoke to both boys separately at home after the incident. Bolland confirmed they “planned to go into school with a firearm in order to get rid of those who had wronged them”, but Wyllie denied everything. >> A month later, detectives seized the latter’s diary and found a rucksack in his hideout containing a balaclava, a bag of screws, cable ties and a bottle of flammable liquid. He told police he had the items so he could run away with his girlfriend. He denied planning to kill her parents or pupils and teachers at his school. (...) >> Prosecutors said North Yorkshire police did not respond adequately to the threat until a specialist counter-terrorism team took over the investigation a month later. Phil Cain, assistant chief constable, admitted their investigation fell below standards and that a review had taken place. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jul/20/two-boys-given-10-and-12-years-for-columbine-style-attack-plot-yorkshire https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jul/20/two-boys-giv... (The damning evidence: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jul/20/two-boys-given-10-and-12-years-for-columbine-style-attack-plot-yorkshire#img-2 https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jul/20/two-boys-giv...) [A terrorist assembles a terror kit containing a knife, a hammer and a suicide note.] Ordering Gunton, who suffers from an autism spectrum disorder, to be detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure, the judge Mark Wall QC, told the former A-level student: “The police found a rucksack in your room which contained a knife, a hammer and what has been referred to as a suicide note or a martyrdom letter. In the martyrdom letter you referred to yourself as a ‘soldier of Isis’. “The letter was written in such terms that it was obviously to be found and read after you had carried out a terrorist attack.” The judge described the items found in the rucksack as a “terrorist’s kit” and said it was clear from Instagram posts in English and Arabic that Gunton, who lived on a farm, had planned to launch an attack. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/02/teenager-lloyd-gunton-jailed-cardiff-pop-concert-terrorist-attack-plot https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/02/teenager-llo...
jimbob45 6y ago
I mean the FBI thought it would be a good idea to persuade MLK to kill himself over his adultery. Moral quandaries aside, that is a remarkably stupid plan if you’re looking to cripple the civil rights movement. Best case scenario, he does it and everyone immediately suspects the FBI/CIA forever.
alexpotato 6y ago
There is also the interesting case where spies and intelligence can be TOO good. It goes something thing like this: - Spy for Country X picks up intelligence that Country Y is about to do crazy thing A. This information is 100% true and correct. - Country Y is not in the habit of doing crazy things like A. - Given that, the government of Country X thinks "This must be false because country Y would NEVER do such a thing." - Country Y then goes and does thing A. There are MANY instances of this throughout the history of intelligence services and I always think of this type of scenario every time I hear "well spies are just terrible."
- dylan604 6y ago
  Or the more common case where the information is so good that acting on the information would reveal the source/means of the information allowing the spied upon to eliminate the source so no action is taken.
- carapace 6y ago
  Weren't the plans for Operation Market Garden discovered by the Germans in a crashed plane and ignored? Something like that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Market_Garden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Market_Garden
  - int_19h 6y ago
    The biggest one of those was Stalin's refusal to believe that Germans would attack the USSR, even when it was so imminent that all alarms were going off (and duly reported to him as such).
  - redis_mlc 6y ago
    Even without plans, the Allies crashed a bunch of gliders and the Germans unexpectedly had tanks positioned in the area. (Glider tow pilots generally did not use the correct air speeds when avoiding flak and enemy fighters, resulting in horrific losses. Often soldiers would jump, and the high airspeeds would instantly rip off their parachutes and equipment.) The Germans in WW2 were not an army you wanted to fight with on equal terms.
dificilis 6y ago
On a related note, was there someone working in US Intelligence whose job it was to tell President Trump that possibly the WHO's early statement on human-human transmission of the "new coronavirus" depended on information from China, and maybe that information from China wasn't correct, because, you know, you can't always trust everything that the Chinese government says?
- ciarannolan 6y ago
  I suspect that the intelligence community hides a good deal from him, for good reason.
DaftDank 6y ago
Before I glanced at the authors name, I knew this was Adam Curtis just from the writing style. Instantly reminded me of "Hypernormalisation" (which everyone should watch) and "The Power of Nightmares."
giardini 6y ago
It's a lot worse than the title claims: almost NO experts ANYWHERE in government are good at their jobs. And it isn't limited to governments of course. The book "Wrong: Why Experts* Keep Failing Us" by David H. Freedman shows that government, academic and private industry are quite lacking in "expertise". The current pandemic cock-ups with the CDC, "epidemiology experts", reporters, commentators, analysts and political appointees all now make sense. Freedman doesn't have a solution, instead leaving us with "11 Simple Never-Fail Rules For Not Being Misled by Experts". but the situation laid out does suggest that we (taxpayers) should slash funding for most governmental, academic and private agencies b/c they fail to come through and literally lack expertise. "No lesson seems to be so deeply inoculated by the experience of life as that you never should trust experts." - Lord Salisbury
- ciarannolan 6y ago
  >[...] almost NO experts ANYWHERE in government are good at their jobs. Doctors at the NIH, scientists at the Department of Energy, biologists at USAMRIID, etc etc etc. All bad at their jobs? What kind of absurd reductionist take is this?
  - DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
    A “small-government” libertarian argument predicated on the assumption that the private sector - with its profit-motive - yields better overall results. Ayn Randian bollocks to be sure.
  - giardini 6y ago
    ciarannolan says "Doctors at the NIH, scientists at the Department of Energy, biologists at USAMRIID, etc etc etc. All bad at their jobs?" Yes. See the book "Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us" by David H. Freedman. Meanwhile... "No lesson seems to be so deeply inoculated by the experience of life as that you never should trust experts." - Lord Salisbury
  - giardini 6y ago
    Let's start with CDC: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/danvergano/cdc-coronavirus-containment-redfield https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/danvergano/cdc-coronavi...
ItGoesItGoes 6y ago
They failed to recruit me, because they couldn't convince me that I'd be involved in anything I'd actually want to have a hand in, or be responsible for.
peter_l_downs 6y ago
I'll set aside the usual commentary on Adam Curtis just to highly recommend this article by Adam Gopnik on the utter futility/uselessness of spying https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/02/are-spies-more-trouble-than-theyre-worth https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/02/are-spies-more... it's damn-well convincing.
- n4r9 6y ago
  For a comedic take on the topic, the British satirist Chris Morris released a movie called The Day Shall Come a couple of years ago which explores how "news" is constructed by media jointly with organisations like the FBI. It's not as entertaining as Four Lions imo but it's very well researched as usual.
ajayh 6y ago
To be a contrarian, don't forget Adam Curtis went to Oxbridge. Maybe he got turned down by MI5.
RNCTX 6y ago
It's still baffling to me that we are expected to believe, for example, that the CIA passes out millions of dollars in war-torn obscenely poor countries like Afghanistan, versus the more obvious assumption that people who work for the CIA have more suitcases full of cash buried around the world than Pablo Escobar ever did.
kwhitefoot 6y ago
Did anyone ever seriously believe that spies in general know what they are doing? It seems unlikely that such groups of people would necessarily be better organized than any other well financed group of people (such as a major industrial concern) especially when you consider that much of what they must do has to be done in the dark and is difficult to verify. Plus of course you have the problem that a lot of what they do know how to do only exists because of the existence of their counterparts in the opposing country and has nothing to do with actual intelligence gathering but rather is about competition and conflict between agencies both between and within counties and alliances.
FerretFred 6y ago
The more I see headlines like The Suspect was known to the Secret Services", and, "The Suspect was on the Authorities' radar and deemed of no interest", the more I believe our spies are dumber than they'd admit. Either that or they, and the Government have a different agenda.

198 points by tjalfi 6y ago

(submitter) This post was previously submitted in 2013[0][1] and 2017[2]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6184984 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6184984 - 102 comments [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6690913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6690913 - 11 comments [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14500633 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14500633 - 139 comments

throwaway1917 6y ago

It so happens that this story has since moved on slightly since it was last posted. Two years ago, Michael Bettaney died. I knew him briefly - after he got out of jail, he moved into small-group communist politics, where we crossed paths. The stuff about his incompetence as a spy is rather overstated. By the time I knew him, he certainly had a drink problem, which may for all I know have predated his long prison sentence (much of it in solitary). The truth is of course that MI5 was not the only intelligence agency with double agents and he was shopped by one such British KGB mole, Oleg Gerdievsky. One rather suspects that the fate of the cold war did not hang in the balance. The underlying point - that counterintelligence has very often proved to be a spectacular waste of human effort - stands, although that is hardly a reason to be insouciant about mass surveillance.

tialaramex 6y ago
> The underlying point - that counterintelligence has very often proved to be a spectacular waste of human effort - stands, although that is hardly a reason to be insouciant about mass surveillance. Mass surveillance causes significant problems regardless of whether intelligence works, and so not only does it make sense for the IETF to write that "Pervasive monitoring is an attack" but I believe that it's morally right for us to say that therefore we should demand our governments desist from such attacks. But that article takes a pretty typical Adam Curtis angle when it comes to facts that dismantle his core thesis - acknowledge them very briefly and then carry on as if they didn't exist. Double Cross is less than a hundred years ago and took place under the circumstance in which actual spies are more valuable - a war. It can and should continue to be held up as an example of how actually sometimes (in a war for example) there are enemy spies and turning or eliminating them can be significant. In the modern era we fight a lot of actions short of war. The most significant subsequent military action in the UK was the Falklands in 1982. But something like Double Cross would have been pointless. Britain did not go to war against Argentina. Argentina wasn't at with Britain. Both countries disagreed about the status of the Falklands, which the Argentinians had (for local political reasons) decided to just seize by force. Because this wasn't a war per se, our "intelligence" was mostly just a result of being friendly with the (similarly awful but not hostile to us) regime in neighbouring Chile. No James Bond types, just somebody who will turn a blind eye to human rights abuses and focus on immediate military intelligence resources.
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  Körner, "The Pleasures of Counting" (1996), has a bit in "The Poles" (on breaking Enigma) that might shed some light on traditional tradecraft vs mass surveillance. (compare what the Stasi could accomplish with their non-automated labour-intensive methods) > Churchill's romantic soul loved the excitement and secrecy surrounding Bletchley. He relished the way that >> ... old procedures, like the setting up of agents, the suborning of informants, the sending of messages written in invisible ink, ... all turned out to be largely cover for this other source, as one might keep some old-established business in rare books going in order to be able, under cover of it, to do a thriving trade in pornography and erotica. 2nd level quote from Muggeridge, "Chronicles of Wasted Time" (1973) p139
- Jon_Lowtek 6y ago
  Mass surveillance will causes even greater problems, if failings like the ones in the article keep happening, which is likely. Look at the MI5 arresting some students based on nothing but a list of different meaning, baseless assumptions and jumping to conclusions. Now imagine such data gathered on a massive scale and the process of bad decision making fully automated. Secret agencies close to the military building a paranoid delusional AI that searches for threats from humans. What could possibly go wrong?

vinceguidry 6y ago

If you think about it, it really shouldn't be surprising. James Bond and other spy movies have convinced us that the government just has endless amounts of money to throw at hard problems. But they don't. Even though the numbers involved are staggering, government departments fight tooth and nail for allocations. The cash you do get, you have to spend most of it on things that make your department look good rather than what will make you better at your job. Then there's plain ole' fraud, waste and abuse, trying to instill an ethic of frugality into someone who is in charge of more taxpayer money a month than they make in a year, well a lot of times that's just going to fall on deaf ears. Spy departments derive effectiveness mostly from having the ability to skirt the law rather than training or having better equipment. The government does have people that really know what they're doing. But their time and attention is limited, again mostly to projects that make their departments look good. As a result it's much easier than you'd think to get away with a lot more than you would think you could.

Spooky23 6y ago
I think that’s a common, but flawed outlook on it. Early in my career I worked for a social services department, a department that was constantly kicked around in the press for various “scandals”, incompetence, etc. It certainly wasn’t the most efficient organization that I’ve seen, but it was not much worse than fortune 100 companies that I’ve worked for or done business with. And For all of the woes, it was very good at what it did. Benefit payments were made, enrollments done, procurements procured, hearings adjudicated, audits completed. It’s easy to get caught up in the noise and determine that these organizations are incompetent and ineffective. The reality is that usually the machine of state is very good at what it does, but they measure many aspects of success with a different measure (compliance) than a company (profit).
- dcolkitt 6y ago
  Systematic research using large datasets shows that public sector organizations are associated with significantly worse management practices.[1] Public sector organizations are nearly as poorly managed as the worse category of private sector firms: those run by the heirs of the original founder. In particular public sector organizations have significantly worse incentive structures, are much more likely to promote based on tenure rather than competence, and are much more likely to retain low performing employees. [1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w17850.pdf https://www.nber.org/papers/w17850.pdf

bscphil 6y ago

This is kind of a strange (though interesting) article. The headlining claim is that "spies aren't good at their jobs". But does the article support that? > The terrible truth that began to dawn in the 1980s was that MI5 - whose job it was to catch spies that threatened Britain - had never by its own devices caught a spy in its entire history. The whole article focuses on MI5, which I'm not really familiar with, and claims that their sole purpose is defensive, to catch spies, and not to spy on other countries. But almost by definition, if Soviet spies were left in high places for decades through the incompetence of MI5, doesn't that mean the Soviet spy agency had a pretty decent track record, either by luck, or by their competence in exploiting the specific weaknesses of MI5? I think it's more likely that the focus on defense is at fault, and not the focus on MI5 in particular. If you get a bunch of spies together, and task them with discovering other spies, then they'll probably find some people who may or may not be actual spies. The problem is in part that the base rate of spies is very low, but also that the people sent to spy in other countries for the most part seem to have kept a low profile (they didn't become head of MI5 or Prime Minister, for example), and also as the article states, that suspiciousness starts to crowd out your actual evidence. But get a bunch of spies together, and task them with gathering intelligence in other countries, and maybe they'll have a much better time of it, on average. At least, if this article provides me with a reason to think anything about this question, it makes me think that they typically were. So all in all it's a nice story, but it's not clear that the claim in the headline is warranted.

duxup 6y ago
>So all in all it's a nice story, but it's not clear that the claim in the headline is warranted. I feel like this is a trend. More and more articles and titles are only connected in the most general ways. Like you can expect most of the keywords to be there but not the meaning.
coderintherye 6y ago
They may have done well to source from "Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA" which provides more factual evidence to support the hypothesis.
- 6y ago

YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago

It's still going on: Fourteen-year-old boy charged with plotting terror attack https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jun/17/fourteen-year-old-boy-charged-with-plotting-terror-attack https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jun/17/fourteen-yea... [Alice in wonderland is secret code for a terror attack.] Teenage girl found guilty of plotting terror attack in London >> Safaa and Rizlaine Boular discussed the attack in a coded conversation – played to the court – about an Alice in Wonderland-themed party. >> In a recording, Rizlaine Boular said she wanted to have “an English tea party kind of thing, little tea cups, tea cakes and stuff”, and Safaa Boular suggested an Alice in Wonderland theme, saying: “You can be the Mad Hatter ‘cause your hair’s crazy. You can have cucumber and butter sandwiches.” >> Around the same time, Dich and Rizlaine Boular travelled around various landmarks in London, which was believed to be a reconnaissance of potential targets. The following day, they went to a supermarket on Wandsworth Road and purchased a packet of kitchen knives and a rucksack. (...) >> “This was without doubt a major investigation for the counter-terrorism command working jointly with the security service,” said Dean Haydon, the Met’s senior national coordinator for counter-terrorism. >> “Not only because it involved a family with murderous intent, but because it is the first all-female terrorist plot that’s been launched in the UK related to Daesh [Isis].” https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jun/04/teenage-girl-boular-guilty-plotting-terror-attack-london-british-museum https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jun/04/teenage-girl... [A columbine style attack is planned by teenagers aremed with a rucksack containing stones, batteries, ~50g of screws and matches. And a bottle of Head & Shoulders shampoo.] Boys given 10 and 12 years for Columbine-style plot in Yorkshire >> Police spoke to both boys separately at home after the incident. Bolland confirmed they “planned to go into school with a firearm in order to get rid of those who had wronged them”, but Wyllie denied everything. >> A month later, detectives seized the latter’s diary and found a rucksack in his hideout containing a balaclava, a bag of screws, cable ties and a bottle of flammable liquid. He told police he had the items so he could run away with his girlfriend. He denied planning to kill her parents or pupils and teachers at his school. (...) >> Prosecutors said North Yorkshire police did not respond adequately to the threat until a specialist counter-terrorism team took over the investigation a month later. Phil Cain, assistant chief constable, admitted their investigation fell below standards and that a review had taken place. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jul/20/two-boys-given-10-and-12-years-for-columbine-style-attack-plot-yorkshire https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jul/20/two-boys-giv... (The damning evidence: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jul/20/two-boys-given-10-and-12-years-for-columbine-style-attack-plot-yorkshire#img-2 https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jul/20/two-boys-giv...) [A terrorist assembles a terror kit containing a knife, a hammer and a suicide note.] Ordering Gunton, who suffers from an autism spectrum disorder, to be detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure, the judge Mark Wall QC, told the former A-level student: “The police found a rucksack in your room which contained a knife, a hammer and what has been referred to as a suicide note or a martyrdom letter. In the martyrdom letter you referred to yourself as a ‘soldier of Isis’. “The letter was written in such terms that it was obviously to be found and read after you had carried out a terrorist attack.” The judge described the items found in the rucksack as a “terrorist’s kit” and said it was clear from Instagram posts in English and Arabic that Gunton, who lived on a farm, had planned to launch an attack. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/02/teenager-lloyd-gunton-jailed-cardiff-pop-concert-terrorist-attack-plot https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/02/teenager-llo...

jimbob45 6y ago

I mean the FBI thought it would be a good idea to persuade MLK to kill himself over his adultery. Moral quandaries aside, that is a remarkably stupid plan if you’re looking to cripple the civil rights movement. Best case scenario, he does it and everyone immediately suspects the FBI/CIA forever.

alexpotato 6y ago

There is also the interesting case where spies and intelligence can be TOO good. It goes something thing like this: - Spy for Country X picks up intelligence that Country Y is about to do crazy thing A. This information is 100% true and correct. - Country Y is not in the habit of doing crazy things like A. - Given that, the government of Country X thinks "This must be false because country Y would NEVER do such a thing." - Country Y then goes and does thing A. There are MANY instances of this throughout the history of intelligence services and I always think of this type of scenario every time I hear "well spies are just terrible."

dylan604 6y ago
Or the more common case where the information is so good that acting on the information would reveal the source/means of the information allowing the spied upon to eliminate the source so no action is taken.
carapace 6y ago
Weren't the plans for Operation Market Garden discovered by the Germans in a crashed plane and ignored? Something like that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Market_Garden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Market_Garden
- int_19h 6y ago
  The biggest one of those was Stalin's refusal to believe that Germans would attack the USSR, even when it was so imminent that all alarms were going off (and duly reported to him as such).
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  Even without plans, the Allies crashed a bunch of gliders and the Germans unexpectedly had tanks positioned in the area. (Glider tow pilots generally did not use the correct air speeds when avoiding flak and enemy fighters, resulting in horrific losses. Often soldiers would jump, and the high airspeeds would instantly rip off their parachutes and equipment.) The Germans in WW2 were not an army you wanted to fight with on equal terms.

dificilis 6y ago

On a related note, was there someone working in US Intelligence whose job it was to tell President Trump that possibly the WHO's early statement on human-human transmission of the "new coronavirus" depended on information from China, and maybe that information from China wasn't correct, because, you know, you can't always trust everything that the Chinese government says?

ciarannolan 6y ago
I suspect that the intelligence community hides a good deal from him, for good reason.

DaftDank 6y ago

Before I glanced at the authors name, I knew this was Adam Curtis just from the writing style. Instantly reminded me of "Hypernormalisation" (which everyone should watch) and "The Power of Nightmares."

giardini 6y ago

It's a lot worse than the title claims: almost NO experts ANYWHERE in government are good at their jobs. And it isn't limited to governments of course. The book "Wrong: Why Experts* Keep Failing Us" by David H. Freedman shows that government, academic and private industry are quite lacking in "expertise". The current pandemic cock-ups with the CDC, "epidemiology experts", reporters, commentators, analysts and political appointees all now make sense. Freedman doesn't have a solution, instead leaving us with "11 Simple Never-Fail Rules For Not Being Misled by Experts". but the situation laid out does suggest that we (taxpayers) should slash funding for most governmental, academic and private agencies b/c they fail to come through and literally lack expertise. "No lesson seems to be so deeply inoculated by the experience of life as that you never should trust experts." - Lord Salisbury

ciarannolan 6y ago
>[...] almost NO experts ANYWHERE in government are good at their jobs. Doctors at the NIH, scientists at the Department of Energy, biologists at USAMRIID, etc etc etc. All bad at their jobs? What kind of absurd reductionist take is this?
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  A “small-government” libertarian argument predicated on the assumption that the private sector - with its profit-motive - yields better overall results. Ayn Randian bollocks to be sure.
- giardini 6y ago
  ciarannolan says "Doctors at the NIH, scientists at the Department of Energy, biologists at USAMRIID, etc etc etc. All bad at their jobs?" Yes. See the book "Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us" by David H. Freedman. Meanwhile... "No lesson seems to be so deeply inoculated by the experience of life as that you never should trust experts." - Lord Salisbury
- giardini 6y ago
  Let's start with CDC: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/danvergano/cdc-coronavirus-containment-redfield https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/danvergano/cdc-coronavi...

ItGoesItGoes 6y ago

They failed to recruit me, because they couldn't convince me that I'd be involved in anything I'd actually want to have a hand in, or be responsible for.

peter_l_downs 6y ago

I'll set aside the usual commentary on Adam Curtis just to highly recommend this article by Adam Gopnik on the utter futility/uselessness of spying https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/02/are-spies-more-trouble-than-theyre-worth https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/02/are-spies-more... it's damn-well convincing.

n4r9 6y ago
For a comedic take on the topic, the British satirist Chris Morris released a movie called The Day Shall Come a couple of years ago which explores how "news" is constructed by media jointly with organisations like the FBI. It's not as entertaining as Four Lions imo but it's very well researched as usual.

ajayh 6y ago

To be a contrarian, don't forget Adam Curtis went to Oxbridge. Maybe he got turned down by MI5.

RNCTX 6y ago

It's still baffling to me that we are expected to believe, for example, that the CIA passes out millions of dollars in war-torn obscenely poor countries like Afghanistan, versus the more obvious assumption that people who work for the CIA have more suitcases full of cash buried around the world than Pablo Escobar ever did.

kwhitefoot 6y ago

Did anyone ever seriously believe that spies in general know what they are doing? It seems unlikely that such groups of people would necessarily be better organized than any other well financed group of people (such as a major industrial concern) especially when you consider that much of what they must do has to be done in the dark and is difficult to verify. Plus of course you have the problem that a lot of what they do know how to do only exists because of the existence of their counterparts in the opposing country and has nothing to do with actual intelligence gathering but rather is about competition and conflict between agencies both between and within counties and alliances.

FerretFred 6y ago

The more I see headlines like The Suspect was known to the Secret Services", and, "The Suspect was on the Authorities' radar and deemed of no interest", the more I believe our spies are dumber than they'd admit. Either that or they, and the Government have a different agenda.