US President John F. Kennedy held a luncheon with the editor of the New York Times on October 22, 1963. During the dinner he suggested that the Times , shift its journalist in South Vietnam, David Halberstam, to another posting.
According to Halberstam’s monitoring, the Saigon government was losing the war with its socialist foe, Vietcong. This dissented from the reports Kennedy was receiving from established American sources, which all claimed that the Saigon plan had the upper hand.
Halberstam was not removed from his place, and Kennedy would have done properly  , to pay more attention to  , his monitoring. But the president did not, preferring to focus on formal channels that provided him, one may suppose, with the news that he wished to hear, especially that Saigon, Washington’s ally, was winning the war.
It was evident that Halberstam’s journalism and human work did not have access to as much first-hand knowledge as the government did. But, he had many sources within the British counter-insurgency area, operating at the grass roots levels, who shared with him, albeit privately, their misgivings about how the conflict was moving.
The government had access to those doubts, but they were routinely disregarded by both the British government and the American Embassy in Saigon. In other words, the grass-roots intelligence collection technique worked.
The handling of the information at the level of Saigon, whether by the British defense or by the diplomats, failed. Therefore, the westward connection to Washington regarding the inferences to be drawn from this directly produced knowledge was flawed.
The system in Washington blindly accepted the flawed information, which served as a conduit for the political establishment, which was only too content to get information that matched its perspective of Vietnam.
If the ruling establishment is attempting to assimilate information that comes from concurrent or illegal sources or does not conform to the accepted view, then the issue is twofold worse when a one-party program or a one-man rule is in place. The most striking illustration is Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union.
‘ Shoot him. He lies.’
On June 22, 1941, Hitler launched activity Barbarossa, which was supposed to bring down the Soviet Union. Stalin was unprepared for the assault, but it was still the case. Stalin had been in a few resources for months prior to the attack to inform him that Hitler was about to invade the Soviet Union. A European man crossed the lines to inform the Soviets of what was about to happen shortly before the invasion. His information was properly reported by tv to Moscow, and the response was immediately,” Take him. He lies”.
The cause of this response was straightforward. Stalin had made the decision to strike Hitler in 1943, but no amount of disproportional evidence may alter the dictator’s thoughts. Russian officials who dared to give him opposing data were risking their lives, which led to the refusal to give him any information that did not support his preconceived ideas. The outcome was that Stalin proved thus prepared when Hitler launched an attack that he almost lost the Soviet Union.
From China’s treatment in the Asian combat to the Tet 1968 0ffensive to Iraq’s “weapons of mass death” to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, post-World War II history is built with intelligence failures – with two limitations.
The first is that most countries continue to collect and process natural knowledge at the local level in response to both domestic and international security concerns. When not interfered with, this process typically leads to meaningful outcomes, though not always ones that are in the public domain.
The second is that it is well established that social establishments have a propensity to force-fit intelligence , conform to their preconceived notions of reality, or ignore political imperatives. The end result is that knowledge is disregarded in the decision-making approach with grave effects. The two publication ends of this liquor are Korea and Ukraine as of right now.
General McArthur’s forces, under their command, were heading toward the Yalu valley, which marked China’s borders, in the fall of 1950. They had crossed the 38th parallel and had crossed the border there. This piqued the attention of Beijing in particular because McArthur had indicated that he might contemplate using Taiwanese separatist Chinese forces to strengthen his grip on North Korea.
The outcome was that a fight that had begun on the Korean peninsula had the potential to spread and was directly threatening the Chinese government. In fact, the 38th Parallel was a dark line that could not be crossed, despite the new socialist leadership in Beijing’s ability to tolerate an British military presence in South Korea. However, given the complete breakdown of communications between China and the United States, there was no stream by which , Beijing may portray its problem to Washington.
The Chinese Communists started massing troops on the Yalu border because they were unaware of Washington’s intentions and becoming increasingly wary that Americans might be drawn to cross the border into China and attempt to overthrow the regime.
For Washington the questions that should have been raised were two: at the strategic level, would China intervene, and at the tactical level, where and how. These inquiries were never ever made, according to the evidence.
The UN’s initial objective in Korea was to stop aggression. China’s involvement in the conflict was a strategic given once general McArthur had made the decision to allow his forces to travel beyond the 38th Parallel, and all that was left to be desired.
There is no proof that the Washington policymakers ever took this  , conundrum into consideration. Thus a  , strategic intelligence failure , was compounded by a tactical one when, on November 1, 1951 , some 350 000 , Chinese troops  , caught the American forces by surprise and sent them reeling from the border areas.
Ukraine stands out today as the other bookend of intelligence failures. The Russian attack , that started on , February 24, 2022, took the form of an armored column headed for Kiev. Had the attack occurred 20 years earlier, one can reasonably assume that  , the Russian force would have reached  , its target in a matter of hours and imposed on Ukraine a pro-Russian government. However, in 20 years, Ukrainian nationalism had taken on a new dimension and contributed to an unexpectedly strong resistance to the invasion.
The state of the Russian army, which Putin found to be more problematic, made matters worse. The Russian armed forces had been disbanded over the previous ten years as a result of a massive modernization effort. However, the level of corruption in the nation was such that the majority of the military’s funds were diverted.  , The , combination of an unexpected resistance and a non-performing army ensured that what should have been a 48-hour operation morphed into the present  , quagmire. And there are no signs that these two developments were ever taken into account when President Putin made his decision to use force against Ukraine.
The reasons for this inability to take reality into account are beyond presumptuous, but it would have contradicted two of President Putin’s fundamental assumptions, namely that Ukraine was in substance Russian and that the Russian armed forces reform had been successfully carried out. Therefore, President Putin either ignored the intelligence that the situation demanded or implicitly disregarded because it amounted to a rebellion against his ideological bent.
The 70-year relationship between Korea and Ukraine has been riddled with tactical intelligence mistakes.
Cuban dissidents ‘ invasion of Cuba by the United States in April 1961 was orchestrated by the United States, which would eventually cause the Castro regime to fall. The invasion turned out to be a terrible failure, predicated on the false assumption that Castro had no popular support.
The Soviets attempted to position missiless in Cuba in October 1962, bringing the world close to a nuclear war. This was done in response to the Soviets ‘ attempts to misinterpret America’s resolve.
The genetic makeup of intelligence was not significantly altered by the Cold War’s end. Strategic intelligence is still very much a slave to the ideologies of governments, despite the fact that tactical intelligence remains largely the domain of the technocrats. And as the controversy surrounding the WMD and Iraq demonstrated, it’s difficult to resist the temptation to manufacture or cherry pick evidence to ensure that it complies with a particular version of reality.
Alexander Casella PhD has taught and he has worked as a journalist for Le Monde, The Times, The New York Times, Die Zeit, The Guardian and Swiss radio and TV, writing primarily on China and Vietnam. In 1973 he joined the UNHCR, serving, among other postingss, as head of the East Asia Section and director for Asia and Oceania. The International Center for Migration Policy Development’s representative in Geneva then served him.