America’s intelligence blunders have continued for decades
The track record of failure by our intelligence community is stunning. It has been hobbling the United States since WWII, and there seems no end to bad judgement.
When Donald Trump was elected president, he soon became very suspicious of those in the FBI and intelligence agencies who he thought were wiretapping him. The first reaction was to scoff at Trump.
Then we learned he was right. Senator Chuck Schumer warned Trump about starting a war with intelligence agencies and said he was “really being dumb.” John Brennan, director of the CIA, warned President Trump to “watch what he says.”
Was Trump right? Let’s consider the record.
They miscalculated China’s civil war between the Nationalists led by Chiang Kai-shek and Communists led by Mao Zedong. Our intelligence completely underestimated the strength of the Communists as the Nationalists fled to Taiwan.
Later during the Korean War, the CIA maintained that China would not intervene. Gen. Douglas MacArthur was confident it would not happen, resulting in thousands of U.S. soldiers dying when China’s armies crossed the Yalu River by the tens of thousands.
The CIA asserted that the Soviet Union would not position ICBM’s or nuclear bombs in Cuba. The crisis became known as the “Missiles of October” in 1962. Nikita Krushchev took the world to the brink of nuclear war.
Remember the U.S. spy ship, the Pueblo, in 1968? They thought it could cruise the coast of North Korea in international waters while gathering intelligence. The North Koreans captured the ship and its 83-man crew. It took nearly a year to get our crew released from jail. Our ship remains a tourist attraction in North Korea.
In the scariest nonfiction book about China, Michael Pillsbury’s “The Hundred-Year Marathon” documents China’s long-term strategy to achieve global domination.
Pillsbury reminds us that “in 1979, the highest-ranking analyst, Robert Bowie, testified to Congress that the Shah of Iran would remain in power, that the Ayatollah Khomeini had no chance to take over and that Iran was stable.”
Late in 1979, again the U.S. was caught with its pants down when our embassy in Tehran was overrun and the hostage crisis under President Jimmy Carter would drag on for 444 days in agonizing frustration.
Iran went on to become the world’s leading exporter of terror.
Regarding China during the 1980s, Pillsbury notes that no one in the CIA or intelligence community thought it possible for China to deceive the United States. In fact, the prevailing opinion was that China was moving toward being a free market economy and that would lead to democracy.
Of course, China was implementing a long-term strategy to deceive the world and create a strong communist dictatorship to control the economies of the world and surpass the United States in every respect.
If there was any doubt about Chinese communists using overwhelming force, the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989 would become a landmark in unbridled suppression when tanks and soldiers moved in, killing thousands of unarmed students and protestors.
Today, we have the massive protests by 2 million in Hong Kong. It remains unclear how China will respond.
The pace of major intelligence failures continued unabated.
In 1990, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. The entire world was shocked by the invasion. American military and intelligence officials at the highest levels were also surprised by the magnitude and speed of the invasion.
In 2003, Collin Powell addressed the U.N. Security Council with “proof” that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. That precipitated another war, “Iraqi Freedom.”
None were found. Unfortunately, hundreds of thousands would die.
And the beat goes on ... the failures mounted in a string of surprise events: the Arab Spring, the death of Kim Jong Il; Libya, Khaddaffi and Benghazi; the rise of Al Qaeda and the disaster of 9/11; ISIS; Russia’s invasion of Crimea; the still unfolding disaster in Venezuela, and countless other wars in Africa and the sub-continent.
Today, we have too many former intelligence directors becoming opinion cable news commentators. Former CIA Director John Brennan openly feuds with Trump.
The results of the disproven “Russia Collusion” accusation and the recent CIA’s whistleblower on Trump’s private conversation with Ukraine’s president has made things even worse. Our president cannot trust our own Intelligence operatives.
Future presidents will have similar deep-seated fears as a result.
The intelligence community is now politicized, and suspicion is crippling.
The worst failure of all 17 intelligence agencies since Pearl Harbor is the creation of little confidence and trust by our Chief Executive.