I just don't understand taking people who are putting their lives on the line, doing their work without recognition, and bashing them. It's got to be hard on them.
Agreed, Mac. In maybe twenty years I'll have some stories to tell, but not now. It isn't perfect but it's very good. So why does the public think it's all screwed up? I think it's this: all the hooey in Tom Clancy stories is coming home to roost. Human intelligence isn't like Tom Clancy, and it sure isn't like Ian Fleming. Human intelligence is sitting in an uncomfortable position, eating greasy rice with a dude who's trying to calculate whether it's better for him and his family to give the terrorist up to you, or to give you up to the terrorist. Who's probably his cousin.
Human intelligence is meeting a police chief and listening between his lines for the vital facts he can't tell you.
Human intelligence is having six sources tell you six different locations for the guy you're sizing up for an all-expences-paid trip to the Caribbean. You have to figure out who knows and is telling the truth, who knows and is lying, and who doesn't know and is fabricating a story -- and why.
Human intelligence is waiting at the rendezvous point two hours longer than the plan, because leaving means you have to face what probably happened to your guy.
Human intelligence is having a widow, out of breath from days of crying, look in your eyes and say, "He trusted you." And you give her $200 cause it's all you have. And a clerk somewhere disallows the expenditure later when you voucher it.
Human intelligence is the ultimate sales job. You are selling a great product, the American way; some try to cheat you but some give you their trust, their love, their family members.
Considering the handicaps they've had to overcome, along with some internal dissention, they've done remarkably well.
Right -- plus... a lot of folks don't understand.. internal dissension in intel work is normal. If our folks didn't argue, and just accepted the judgments of their superiors, well, that would be like the KGB - and we know where they wound up, hanging on to the 2nd Place Trophy in the Cold War.
One thing that has been missed is that the intel agencies (the civil ones) are very, very tightly integrated with the military. It used to be that the information each developed was stovepiped up its own channels and never shared... that attitude is mostly history.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F