Money quote(s):
"French intelligence may have missed a few indications that Mohammed Merah was not the average guy. He was on the US no-fly list, apart from having been ejected from Afghanistan in 2008 by US forces. French intelligence itself apparently had orders to watch him and had interviewed him on the occasion of his return from Afghanistan, which he described as being a tourist trip."
Repeat after me: there are no tourists in Afghanistan. None. Ever. Niente.
"There was, as one French politician put it, altogether “too many arms, too many trips, too much money” — and too much pull for Merah to be your typical lone gunman next door. The natural thing for conspiracy theorists to suspect was that he was somebody’s asset — just whose and on which side of the fence — is fertile ground for speculation. But there is one depressing alternative. Everybody just screwed up."
And that's another harsh lesson of intelligence as practised in the real world. Not simply the sterile "mistakes were made," but the grittier fact that people make mistakes.
"The dangers of figuring out just who is working for whom was illustrated by the Camp Chapman attack in Afghanistan, when an entire CIA cell was blown up by their prize agent, who as it turned out, was working for the other side."
That disaster could have been prevented quite simply, more's the pity. CAA sincerely hopes that the CIA's operators have incorporated the lessons-learned therefrom.
"Intelligence operations are by their very nature a high-risk business. But as a CIA study remarked, the biggest intelligence failures are marked by two characteristics: a failure of fusion of knowledge and a lack of objectivity."
Good points. Intelligence fusion can take place at many levels; its quality is going to vary based on many factors, not least of which will be the quality of the analysts doing the fusion and the level and breadth of access they have to various sources of intelligence and information.
As for objectivity, well, there's always the danger of "falling in love with your source." Not actual love-love, you understand; just losing objectivity.
"Everything is always clear on Monday morning to the intelligence pathologist. But everyone who died in the Sunday game is still dead."
Harsh. But not untrue.
"Lack of Objectivity is even more damaging to the intelligence cause."
If you already have a conclusion, then why go through the motions of the intelligence process, why do all that collection and analysis, unless as a form of theater?
"(P)eople have agendas. They want to see the world in certain ways — whether the world is really like that or not — because their political masters want to view the world in that way. So you distort intelligence and if you want a world in which there are no jihadis, only right wing Neo-Nazis, then you get a world with only right wing Neo-Nazis.
The result of course, is that bad stuff happens. And here’s the third rule of intelligence failure which the CIA document omits. The really useful thing about post-mortems on failures is not what you learn, but who you can blame. The entire purpose of a post-mortem is to protect bias in the system. The result in these cases is that the least powerful bias is sacrificed to the gods. Such a sacrificial victim becomes the designated Fall Guy." (Emphasis in original text. - CAA.)
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