from Hacker News

The obscure intelligence bureau that got Vietnam, Iraq, and Ukraine right

by mileseva on 5/29/24, 10:02 AM with 78 comments

• by bawolff on 5/29/24, 2:56 PM

  Getting iraq not having WMD right probably isn't that hard.

  Allegedly canadian intelligence knew this, but had it all marked "for canadian eyes only" because they were worried about consequences if usa found out they weren't on board. I highly doubt canada has super-spies, the problem is usa really wanted there to be WMDs, so they came to the conclusion there was.

  https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canadian-intelligence-asses...

• by comfysocks on 5/29/24, 3:00 PM

  Maybe it’s because “nobody’s heard of them” and “nobody listens to them” that they are allowed to come to correct conclusions?

  Maybe if they were as influential as the CIA they would get a ton of political pressure to throw out their analysis and echo the current administration’s foregone conclusions?

• by tivert on 5/29/24, 2:54 PM

  > The most important factor in building this culture, every veteran I spoke to stated, is the unusual way that INR selects and uses analysts. The CIA and DIA tend to favor generalists. Analysts rotate between roles every two to three years, often changing countries or even regions. At INR, the average analyst has been on their topic for over 14 years. “At most of the other intel organizations you rotate out of your portfolio every two to three years,” McCarthy says. “At INR, they die at their desks.”

  That seems like lesson MBAs should take to heart.

• by riehwvfbk on 5/29/24, 1:40 PM

  It's not that nobody listens, it's that the information disseminated via the media is not what's correct, but rather what is politically expedient at the moment.

  Case in point: where in the article is the INR's brilliant prediction about the future of the war in Ukraine?

• by vundercind on 5/29/24, 2:58 PM

  Iraq was pretty easy to call. I got it largely right as a high schooler at the time it started. One thing that threw me was that we stayed so damn long, which put my “cross-border islamist group destabilizes Syria” prediction off by years. I underestimated our stomach for throwing money and lives away I guess.

• by firesteelrain on 5/29/24, 2:41 PM

  What I gathered from this is that not the INR is full of oracles or people who have the magic skill to foresee the future but rather really smart people who based on past experience can see patterns of behavior and infer future state from that. Then, they are so small they are required to innovate and iterate on intelligence.

• by kklisura on 5/29/24, 2:47 PM

  Ok so what's the INR take on China-Taiwan?

• by no_exit on 5/29/24, 6:09 PM

  INR was also the source of the concentration camp ("strategic hamlet") strategy in South Vietnam.

  > The INR director saw the counterinsurgency effort's emphasis on military security as insufficient. Hilsman was much more receptive to ideas for population resettlement and control along lines advanced by Robert G. Thompson, a British consultant to the Diem government, and adopted them as his own. Kennedy asked Hilsman to prepare a paper showing how this concept could work.

  https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB121/prados.htm

• by jongjong on 5/29/24, 2:46 PM

  I'm guessing the purpose of the CIA is to produce information which leads to political actions that yield financial benefits for the country while the purpose of INR is to produce accurate information without concern for financial benefits. The fact that the government thought it needed 2 organizations to do what is supposed to be the same job shows that neither organization is doing the full job properly. It's almost like they need 2 versions of the 'truth' so that they can weigh up convenient half-truths against inconvenient whole truths.

• by antisthenes on 5/29/24, 3:18 PM

  Intelligence bureaus are like stock pickers.

  You're going to get one eventually that went on a lucky streak and guessed several international developments in a row.

  What about other non-war events? Does INR also do better in that regard?

• by mmsc on 5/29/24, 3:39 PM

  People join the likes of the CIA because they know the name CIA and set it as a goal. No different from large companies.

  But as people set goals the work at a certain place, people lesser-qualified slowly join the ranks until the place is a shell of what it used to be, made up of posers.

  Can't let the truly skilled individuals do great work either, otherwise it'll expose the unskilled individuals' lack-of-purpose in that place, so bureaucracy gets built and gets in the way of everybody trying to do real work.

• by alfiedotwtf on 5/29/24, 2:16 PM

  Sounds like their success comes from not starting with the results you want and reverse engineering the reasoning to justify the outcome.

  Who would have thought removing top-down agendas and starting with a bottom-up approach would end up with a better picture of the truth!

• by pquki4 on 5/29/24, 9:50 PM

  Is there any cherry picking in the article? Do we have statistics about when INR was correct about the course of history while other agencies were wrong?

• by throw0101d on 5/29/24, 2:55 PM

  Somewhat meta-ish question about the Vietnam War for someone who has perhaps studied the topic more: Did the US "lose" the war or did they simply stop 'bothering' with it?

  In 1973 there was the Paris Peace Accords that crystallized (Communist) North Vietnam and (non-communist) South Vietnam, just like the two Koreas. Then in 1975 the north invaded:

  * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_spring_offensive

  and the US (military) basically did nothing to help the south.

  Kind of like Afghanistan more recently: as long as the US had an interest in it the Taliban could not "win", but the US simply concluded that they didn't want to be involved any longer and pulled out.

  If the US had continued support and presence, like with South Korea, would it have been possible that South Vietnam would still be around? Bothering with (South) Vietnam wasn't of strategic importance (?) any more, and so the US pulled out and let the chips fall where they may. If the US had continued to care about Vietnam strategically, could they have continued to make tactical (military) decisions to support the south?

• by hiddencost on 5/29/24, 2:48 PM

  What a curious article... I wonder who the intended audience is.

• by 0xbadcafebee on 5/29/24, 2:53 PM

  3 things right over 70 years, that's.... quite a track record