Based admittedly on now ancient experience and familiarity, the US intel community has always been weak on HUMINT and strong in more technical intelligence areas like SIGINT, COMINT, and whatever they are calling imagery intel these days. That is, we are dependent on our machines and much less skilled with handling human agents. Whether this has changed over the years for the better I have no idea. In the Cold War era, though, the problem was fairly significant. Part of it was cultural, I think. We simply trusted supposedly objective technical means more than fallible humans, and our intelligence services tended to be staffed with technocrats more than the sort of people people that Le Carre writes about.
Of course, the machines are terrible at giving any insight into things like intent and motivation, and while amazingly good at siphoning up info/generating data, are also somewhat vulnerable precisely due to their perceived accuracy and capability. Much like authoritarian regimes that rely on scads of paperwork can be fooled by fake scads of paperwork, systems that trust too much in automated or supposedly objective data can be fooled by maskirovka and clever misdirection.
Sorry! You’re right, my bad. That’s what I get for being outside the paywall.
I was confused because they use a picture from Afghanistan, and this was a major concern for the intelligence community around the evacuation, and even the countries fit.
I do think there are plenty of people after our sources in Afghanistan though.
In the '50s and '60s at least there were cultural currents the other way. My dad was CIA back in the day and he was all about HUMINT. His biggest success came by cultivating a particular agent in Indonesia…
The Cold War gutted our HUMINT stuff, especially after the success of the Communists in China in 1949, when we purged pretty much everyone who knew anything about China. By the 1970s, as I understand it, most of the old guard who were versed in spycraft of the human sort were either gone or had lost influence under the assault of the technocrats and NSA.
My father was Army Counter-Intelligence during that same period, retiring in the early seventies.
I’d really like to see some reporting on the rest of the wrong things. Was the Hellfire an inert warhead, as they initially said it was, or not? Were there kids in and around the car as has been reported and, if so, why didn’t the drone operator see them? Or did the military know the kids were there and launched the missile anyway? If so, why did they initially dismiss the reports that there were civilian casualties? What was the evidence they said they saw that led them to claim there was a secondary explosion from a bomb in the car? And so on.
Sadly, I doubt these questions will be asked, or if asked, if the answers will either be forthcoming or public. We don’t ask ourselves these sorts of things any more, if we ever really did. Oh, there might be some internal fact-finding to figure out what went wrong tactically, but I imagine from the military’s point of view, very little went wrong. They got a target, they killed it. “The rockets go up, I don’t care where they come down. That’s not my department,” said Werner von Braun…
I mean, surely the simplest explanation suffices: they thought they were getting a Bad Guy, turns out it was a Good Guy with some children, they hoped to sweep it under the rug by denying any civilian casualties and throwing in some stuff about a secondary explosion, but this time we got some journalism to uncover what actually happened.
So, it was an inert warhead or not? If not, then they deliberately lied about that? They saw the kids or not? If so, then they deliberately lied about that? If not, how did they target the car?
Menzo
1812
We’re never going to have those answers, at least not given to us by the government. They make the military look really bad, and we can’t have anyone questioning how drone strikes work.
But the answer is that of course they saw the kids. The optics on those drones are extremely advanced.
Someone made a really terrible call. But there will be no accountability.
I take your point, there are details to be worked out. My point is just that this has been a, shall we say, recurring issue for the last 20 years. Here is my guess:
No (not inert–it did go blow up the car, right?). Yes (they lie plenty). Maybe (hard to tell, someone probably thought they were kids, someone else didn’t they went with the latter). Kind of (they obfuscated what happened to make it seem like they didn’t see kids). And they targeted the car because they thought at one point it was an imminent threat and the penalty for being wrong about that is greater than the penalty for blowing up a few more innocent people.
There was probably 15 sec between the firing of the Hellfire and the impact. The report of civilians in the area came “seconds” before it hit.
Yes, I know. My point is that seldom in that 20 years has there been a better opportunity to get to the bottom of exactly what happened, what lies were told, by whom and why. You’d think journalists would be interested in that story.
This is a part of the narrative that doesn’t make sense. The people doing the targeting couldn’t see the kids, but got reports of kids, but too late, from some other people?
Timex
1817
The people doing the targeting would have seen the kids. It would have been the drone operator.
He could possibly have fired the weapon, and then had the kids show up after the weapon was in the air. The timing would have to just be perfectly terrible for that to happen, but it’s possible.
But even in that case, he would have seen the kids run out. He might not have been able to stop it at that point, but he would have been aware of what happened.
This is what I think, too, but that isn’t really the way it is being reported in the little we’re getting from official sources. As I recall, someone else (the CIA?) saw the kids and tried to warn the people doing the targeting, but it was too late. That’s the story that doesn’t make much sense to me: why didn’t the people doing the targeting see the kids.
As to timing, I think by the time the missile struck, there were actually kids in the car. Kids running out of the house and surrounding the car and some actually getting into the car isn’t going to happen in a couple of seconds. Or at least it doesn’t seem so.
Timex
1819
Ya, that was some garbage coverage from CNN.
The CIA may be the guys who decide “Ya, that’s your target”, but the drone operate would have been working with the direct feed.
In terms of seeing who is getting shot, the guy pulling the trigger would have been the guy watching the feed. Someone else might have okayed the shot.
Ya, but that’s what it would have had to take, just based on how fast a hellfire missile travels. Honestly, 15 seconds is fairly conservative, with the missile fired from half its operational range. I’d suspect it’d have been closer in this case.
All that being said, it’s always possible something weird is being missed.
KevinC
1821
Very interesting read, thanks for linking.
