The CIA's Record On The Middle East Is Usually Wrong

The CIA And The Hazards Of Middle East Forecasting -- Tom Gjelten, NPR

Government agencies do not often acknowledge their own errors, but the CIA has done just that with the declassification of intelligence memoranda on the 1973 Arab-Israeli War.

The documents show that agency analysts, down to the last minute before the outbreak of fighting, were assuring President Nixon, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and other policymakers that Egypt and Syria were unlikely to attack Israel.

Those assessments, in the words of a CIA postmortem report from December 1973, "were — quite simply, obviously, and starkly — wrong." Nearly 40 years later, the CIA analysts responsible for those judgments say they are still troubled by their mistakes.

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My Comment: I sometimes wonder if the CIA has the necessary boots on the ground to ascertain threats and intelligence. I know that the CIA/NSA have the electronic tools to paint a broad picture .... and the specialists back home to analyze the data .... but do they have a man (or woman) in the inside (i.e. in the inner circle of places like Syria, Iran, North Korea, etc.). For some reason I have this nagging feeling that we do not .... and hence we make mistakes like the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, missing the Iraq invasion of Kuwait, no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, North Korea's missile test this past December, etc. etc. etc..