INTELLIGENCE AND COMMUNICATION LINES

Intelligence very often does stupid things. As a matter of fact, intelligence does more stupid things than it does bright things, because it is operating covertly and is over a great many obstructions points. The more successful the just offenders. Small intelligence organizations tend to be big organizations because they can evaluate who is giving them reports. Big intelligence services are worst continually loused up because their lines contain a fantastic percentage of false reports or biased judgments. Somebody is actually trying to get them to believe something so they will do something else.

Here is a flagrant example: A small peanut-whistle country wants some American aid. Of course, they might as well be walking around with the State Department guys in their country—they know all of the CIA operators and four foot square red signs on them. So they decide they had better walk up a Russian invasion and they proceed to do so. There is no invasion, they just feed the information back along the lines. The CIA puts it into computers—the damn fools—and then decide that they had better have aid.

This can even go to a little bit further to where the country itself produces an invasion or a riot in order just to bring the aid about. They actively produce this riot. Information and observation is intimately mixed up with the rules of intelligence.

You should make, in your staff library, a ton of intelligence books available, because it all has to do with communication and it is rather covert and it has many liabilities, but all of your lines have these liabilities.