Nice to Know that Someone Reads Newspapers

State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research has a pretty dull job.  They read target country media and actually spend some time studying the countries as countries.

No, covert spies seducing sexy code breakers, no high tech satellites and antenna networks to take in signals, they just read about countries of interest, and do so by reading the actual media from those countries.

They have one distinction though, none of the massive screw-ups or drastically wrong predictions of the TLAs in and around Washington, DC.

Go figure:

Every American knows what the CIA is. I would guess that maybe 1 in 1,000 have ever heard of INR — the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, American diplomats’ in-house intelligence agency.


But if you do know about INR, you probably know two things:

1. It has gotten big stuff right when the CIA and others screwed up.
2. When it got that big stuff right, no one listened to it.

INR is the Cassandra of American intelligence, and it earned that reputation the hard way.

As early as 1961, INR analysts were warning that South Vietnam’s battle against the North and the Viet Cong insurgency was failing, and would ultimately fail because the Viet Cong had the support of villagers in the South. Their analyses prompted furious rebukes from the likes of then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. But they were right.

In 2002, it happened again. The CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the rest of the intelligence community had concluded that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was trying to build nuclear weapons, which became one of the ostensible motivations for the US invasion. INR thought their evidence was nonsense. It was right.

In 2022, it happened again. The intelligence community predicted that Russia would win its war on Ukraine easily, cruising into Kyiv in a matter of days. INR dissented, arguing that Ukraine would put up a spirited fight and prevent Russia from getting anywhere near the capital. It was right. (Brett Holmgren, INR’s current chief, took pains to tell me that INR was not the only dissenter but confirmed that the bureau thought Ukraine would put up a strong fight.)

With a minuscule head count, less than 500, and an even more minuscule budget, $83½ million, they get a lot of bang for the buck.