In the Jan./Feb. 2011 issue of Foreign Policy, former CIA official Paul Pillar takes down the conventional wisdom about the degree to which intelligence -- both good and bad -- can influence presidential decision-making, alter U.S. foreign policy, and prevent surprises. Whatever the limits of the U.S. intelligence community, it continues to face criticism for its perceived shortcomings, most recently for not predicting the Arab Spring and totally missing North Korean leader Kim Jong Il's death.

Indeed, while the intelligence community can claim several successes (Pillar, for example, points to the CIA nailing the Six-Day War in 1967), it has also endured a number of humiliating failures. As the ten examples below demonstrate, these intelligence breakdowns have been at the heart of pivotal events that refashioned the Middle East, altered the course of the Cold War, and thrust the United States into World War II, the war on terror, and the war in Iraq.

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Pearl Harbor Attack

As dawn broke on Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese struck the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, pushing a once-reluctant America headlong into World War II. The naval base was utterly unprepared for battle, even though the United States had managed to break Japanese diplomatic code in the lead-up to the assault and a military attaché in Java had warned Washington of a planned Japanese attack on Hawaii, the Philippines, and Thailand a week earlier. "Never before have we had so complete an intelligence picture of the enemy," Roberta Wholstetter wrote in Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision.

That picture, however, was not seen in full because of inadequate intelligence-sharing among government agencies, faulty U.S. assumptions about Japan's appetite for carrying out such a brazen attack, and rivalries within the U.S. intelligence community. The CIA -- established in 1947 as part of the National Security Act -- later noted that the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor highlighted the need to separate "signals" from "noise" and create a centralized intelligence organization.

Above, the USS Arizona burns during the bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.

U.S. Navy/Newsmakers

 

Uri Friedman is an associate editor at Foreign Policy.

DR. SARDONICUS

9:57 PM ET

January 6, 2012

What, just ten?

You failed to mention many glaring errors, most of them of commission instead of yours of analysis: a sign of the intelligence community’s ongoing malignancy, since it never seems to learn from past errors.

Among them:

A plague of right-wing military and paramilitary coups that blighted countries in Central and South America (almost all of them), Europe (Greece), the Mid-East (Iran under Mossadeq), and Asia (Indonesia, the Philippines), and who knows where else American agents got away with? That set back democracy and human rights for decades, everywhere the CIA touched down with dirty cash and dirty tricks; and those outrages are ongoing as we speak (Honduras, Egypt).

But then again, the title to this piece should be The “Let us count the ways” Biggest American Intelligence Failures…

Protecting Nazi scientists (Paperclip) and just plain fascist war criminals and folding them into the American, European and Japanese geo-political elites.

Provoking (with black commando raids) but failing to forecast the N. Korean invasion of S. Korea. Failing to forecast the Chinese intervention during the Korean War.

Failing the stop the Israeli Bomb, the N. Korean Bomb, the Indian Bomb. Good, bad, indifferent: consistent failure.

Overblowing the Russian military threat for forty years and thus supercharging the military-industrial-waste complex. Among other ways, failing utterly to infiltrate the Soviet leadership with human assets, and to expose the successful Soviet infiltration of British intelligence with human assets.

Overblowing the threat from everywhere except where the trouble actually came from, immediately after the Soviet collapse.

Overblowing the Chinese military threat for the last ten years, and Japanese (?) for five years prior.

Importing drugs from South America to American ghettos, to drug down potential rioters and raise cash for dirty tricks abroad. Fueling an interminable Narco War in Latin America, once the “kill all the progressive populists” game wore out.

Financing, training and protecting the worst kind of Islamic fundamentalists until they turned on us: see “Mossadeq” above. Directly responsible for Islamic terrorism, since it had decapitated Moderate and Democratic Islam since before World War II.

Underreporting the strategic threat of climate change. Every strategic threat to America today is also an opening act of climate change.

In essence, you could say that there has not been a real enemy of the United States that the American intelligence community had not sponsored or strategically lost to, at one time or another during the last fifty years, nor the patron of a popular foreign democracy whose career it did not jeopardize, warp or terminate with prejudice.

With no end and no improvement in sight. But LOTS and LOTS of cash, truthspeak and new people with which to not succeed at in the future.

 

JMBELAN

10:35 AM ET

January 8, 2012

Let's work a little harder

How about the 10 biggest intelligence failures that everyone who reads the paper can't already think of?

 

WICKBAM

2:55 PM ET

January 12, 2012

surely

9/11 should be at least second behind Pearl Harbor, if not 1st on the list? How could the Indian nuclear test be ranked ahead of it?

 

ONDEN

5:34 PM ET

January 12, 2012

Among them: A plague of

Among them:

A plague of right-wing military and paramilitary coups that blighted countries in Central and South America (almost all of them), Europe (Greece), the Mid-East (Iran under Mossadeq), and Asia (Indonesia, the Philippines), and who knows where else American agents got away with porno ? That set back democracy and human rights for decades, everywhere the CIA touched down with dirty cash and dirty tricks; and those outrages are ongoing as we speak (Honduras, Egypt).

 

HECTORGREG11

8:25 PM ET

January 27, 2012

maybe a top 100 list

Lets not cut this list short by any means...the author can probably expand this list ad infinitum, but lets put a cap at 100. The world has seen our fair share of US intel mishaps and the world must be living under a bridge or in a florida rehab not to notice more of these lapses in concentration. The US has most likely swept under the rug countless numbers of these events, so there. Rant satisfied.