Is the USA the worst major power in history at spying and counter-spying? Every couple of years, we give away the store, but the CIA Station Chiefs do make their diversity quotas.
>>>Is the USA the worst major power in history at spying and counter-spying?
Probably.
Ref:
http://blog.barofintegrity.us/2007/09/07/duncan-hunter-speaking-at-the-vfw-forum-in-houston-tx.aspx
Excerpt
The best way to stop a plan to hit the United States or our allies or troops is to have someone in the room when they make the decision. That means human intelligence. That means an agent or somebody working for one of our case officers who can then go and tell us about it and we stop it before execution takes place.
The Clinton Administration decimated the CIA in the 1990s. They took out of position a ton of case officers. [Example and pointing to audience members] If our case officer in the first row here, let’s say you are a taxi cab driver, let’s say you are a reception in a business and you hear a lot of conversations, let’s say that you are a guy on an athletic team and you know some of the guys that are involved with a terrorist operation…When you hear something that happens and I’m the case manager and you all know me, you all have a relationship with me, I’m an American CIA Case Manager. I get information from you. When I’m defunded and I go away and my job is closed. Then 5 years later we go back and say Hunter, go back and start this operation over again. You guys may all be gone. You may be in different places. I will take a long time to recruit new people, get them to the point where they trust me and I can get information from them. That is called human intelligence. And that is the most important information you can get. I can tell you some of the best military operations we had historically was because we had information. We had someone in the room when they made the decision to strike. So we were able to stop them.
So you have to have various means of human intelligence. That is one of the things we are going to have to from here on out. We are going to have to rebuild it. And make sure it is very strong.