In a sense it’s a tongue-in-cheek proposal. But when Kevin Drum today suggests we might do better to shut down all of the rest of our intelligence agencies beside INR — the State Department’s in-house intel bureau — he’s really not that far off. It’s not just a broken clock being right twice a day, as their detractors in other parts of the government and the commentariat like to say. INR has gotten a lot of big questions right of late. And in most cases it’s been through a mix of skepticism, area expertise and breadth of knowledge that seems to provide a check on institutional myopia.
We might also take time to go back and read Ernest May’s Strange Victory: Hitler’s Conquest of France, a book which, in an immediate sense, is about French and German intelligence in the lead-up to the war but is more generally a look into the nature of intelligence failures. A fascinating study.
I reviewed it here at TPM three years ago.
