Intelligence Failures and Decent Intervals

Being no iconoclast, the author, a retired veteran of 20 years in foreign intelligence work including more than 18 years service in Europe and Asia and at the NSA, begins the Foreword of his book with these words:

“My purpose in writing this book is to clear the reputation – to the best of my humble ability – of the U.S. Intelligence Community.  It is not to tar the reputations of the living or the legacies of the dead.  Where that is the result, theirs is the blame, for my success of necessity re-positions the blame where it rightfully belongs, and my greater purpose then is served: the creation of a public awareness that not every alleged intelligence failure purporting to explain a military or diplomatic blunder is what it is claimed to be.  There is an excellent chance that application of the intelligence failure label is a device to hide a leadership failure instead.”

During the past half century, this abuse has shielded a Five-Star General, a Secretary of State and two Presidents in major, history-making events involving Signals Intelligence alone.  Human Intelligence too has been falsely blamed by two other Presidents and a Director of Central Intelligence, threatening our national security, perhaps to an even greater degree.

The book concentrates especially on the truth behind false intelligence-failure allegations made in three such historic events: the 1950 Chinese Communist intervention in the Korean War, the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam, and the so-called surprise attack which began the 1973 Yom Kippur War in the Middle East.  More is included, but these form the centerpiece, the latter two of which directly involved the author as an Intelligence Analyst, and the last as an originator of the intelligence as well.

The reader will be shocked – or perhaps outraged – at these revelations, especially that the clear inference to be drawn from information produced by the U.S. Army’s Center of Military History, is that our loss of the Vietnam war was due to leadership failures related to Signals Intelligence, that created conditions so detrimental to us and so favorable to the enemy, that the resulting battlefield casualty count gave rise to the turmoil on America’s streets that is traditionally blamed for the loss.  In short, we defeated ourselves.

While this book has the potential to create the public awareness indicated as the author’s greater purpose, he states that his, “ . . . fervent prayer and greatest hope is that [his] humble text will persuade the Director of National Intelligence to insure that the leadership failures involving Signals Intelligence that predominated throughout the Vietnam War are never again permitted.”