It is actually downright scary what the CIA was once capable. Since the mid 1975s, they have become ham fisted. I mean they once knew that the Soviets and Chinese were having “issues”. This is inspite of the fact that the majority of the world considered Communism as essentially a “Borg-like” entity.

Another issue is the changing nature of intelligence. During the cold war, it took relatively few intelligence assets to meet our requirements. Finding Soviet missile sites, armored divisions, etc. was pretty easy. The Soviet beaurocratic system made our technical exploitation through sigint easy as well.

Today, the picture is much different. Intelligence is THE focus. In all cases, unlike the cold war, the problem is not destroying forces and the enemy, it’s finding them. This is a fundamental change in intelligence that we are still trying to meet with many legacy systems and capabilities. In the 80’s, it too few intelligence resources to find a Soviet armored division. The problem was having enough firepower to defeat the threat. Today the situation is reversed. We need huge intelligence resources to find and fix targets. Take Zarqawi - the firepower required to take him out was 1 plane and two bombs, but the intelligence required to find and fix that target was monumental. Reversing the entire way we plan and fight adversaries has been a daunting challenge that is still ongoing.

So that’s the larger issue we face. Change is coming, but it’s very slow given our nimble adversaries and dealing with our own funding restrictions and beaurocratic BS.

There certainly are a few in the CIA who play politics. I think that most of them have “retired” at this point though. The majority of people in the CIA are patriotic red-blooded Americans who don’t like the leaks any better than we do.

Anyway, hope that’s enlightening, back to work for me now.

And I would counter that by saying there are some significant changes going on. Maybe not enough yet, but making major changes in intelligence operations in the middle of a very active period is difficult.

We are also stuck with a bunch of leakers someplace and that causes two problems. First, information has to be routed around “leaky” organizations and second, it makes it difficult to get agencies to share information if they fear the information will be leaked from the agency they are sharing with.

I have some degree of faith that these issues are being addressed, just not sure yet how effectively and I am not sure I want or need to know.

Your points, as usual are made reasonably and filled with much truth.

I won’t dispute your major points - but I will say that 5 years after 9/11, one would think that some of the problems you mentioned could have been addressed. No coverage in Bekaa where many of these missiles were flown? No infiltration of Syrian intelligence? Those greedy bastards were stealing money from the Lebanese hand over fist.

My point is that it seems to be business as usual - no one willing to change so that problems such as you mentioned can be attacked from a different direction. This is the culture that many have commented on, including the 9/11 commission.

But you’re probably right about the politics - although that too I think you’re much too sanguine about.

You’re making a wrong judgment based on incomplete and inaccurate information. First, you make many assumptions:

-The CIA is responsible for tracking and reporting this kind of information. No other agencies are to blame.
-The CIA “missed” a HB military capability because all CIA employees are “too busy playing politics.”
-The CIA has had all these failures through history – that proves they’re inept because there aren’t any successes in the news, so they obvious can’t do anything right.

Come on Rick, you’re smarter than that. Broad-brush generalizations don’t suit you.

Tracking the movement of small numbers of relatively small weapons is almost impossible. It’s made even harder because we don’t have an official presence in Iran. Most people forget that an embassy with a diplomatic staff, a CIA station, a DATT and others provide a huge amount of both classified and open source intelligence and information. Running HUMINT operations without a station in country is much more difficult. I’m not arguing that we need to recognize Tehran and re-forge diplomatic relations, but you need to understand that no embassy or official presence in a country does place significant limits on our collection abilities.

Tracking weapon shipments that pretty much fit in a standard cargo container is no easy task. The Iranians are aware of our capabilities after watch us and the Iraqi’s for so long that they are very good at hiding stuff. Finally, I won’t go into the issues of collecting on Hezbollah, but they, like most terrorist organizations, excel at counter-intelligence and internal security.

So blame politics at the CIA all you want. The fact is, it’s not like the movies where we have an all-seeing-eye and can monitor everything on the planet 24/7. Our collection capabilities are limited in many ways, and what resources we do have must be prioritized. There are a lot of threats out there to monitor and we can’t devote resources to everything.

I’m not saying all this as an excuse, but if you do a little research, you’ll easily find out why anticipating events like the ones you mentioned is so difficult. There has been a ton of study on this problem going back decades and there still are no easy solutions. Most of the research is unclassified and published if you want to look into it.

The entire thrust of our Mid East policy is to prevent Hizballah, al-Qaeda, and other Islamist groups from becoming politically ascendant. And it won’t take a hail of rockets from Iran to destroy us. Two or three well placed nukes and this country - our economy, our way of life, our freedom - is gone. We’d be 20 years recovering. Maybe more.

So get off your high horse and take off the blinders. The Middle East is where America’s fate will be determined.

That should tell you all you need to know about why they get so much so very wrong.