You're quite wrong, David. Intell has always been a hit or miss enterprise and even the few times in history where intell has been near perfect, it has been misinterpreted.
A good primer on the subject is Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to Al-Qaeda by John Keegan.
There is a reasonable possibility that I am wrong. However, I just finished reading a book by a modern-history scholar, Derek Leebaert - The Fifty-Year Wound, that has quite adifferent view of CIA performance during and after the Cold War. The Russians ran circles around us in the espionage arena. Their analysis was not very good though, even though analysis is the reason intelligence is gathered in the first place.
We definitely had less than skillful people somewhere in the mix. Real mental ability has great difficulty insinuating itself into and operating within bureaucratic structures.