The Limits of Intelligence
MORGENTHAU, HANS J.
Perspectives THE LIMITS OF INTELLIGENCE by hans j. morgenthau The intelligence community in general and the Central Intelligence Agency in particular are being criticized for not warning policy...
...In 1776, Washington declared that "the Fate of our Country depends in all human probability, on the Exertion of a Few Weeks...
...I know nothing other than what I read in the papers about the performance of the intelligence agencies...
...Thus with regard to Iran, the intelligence community guessed wrong...
...Thus was initiated a period of almost continuous warfare that lasted nearly 25 years...
...If the intelligence community has failed to foresee what a competent and alert intelligence agency could have foreseen, it ought to be held responsible...
...The answer lies in the nature of the empirical material they have to deal with...
...What accounts for the failure of foresight on the part of otherwise bright and responsible men...
...In February 1792, British Prime Minister Pitt justified the reduction of military expenditures and held out hope for further reductions by declaring: "Unquestionably there never was a time in the history of this country when from the situation of Europe we might more reasonably expect 15 years of peace than at the present moment...
...Mutual recriminations are shaking the intelligence community...
...On the same day, Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen accepted the Crown of Spain, an event that three weeks later led to the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War...
...President Carter himself has taken the unprecedented step of publicly reprimanding the highest intelligence authorities for their lack of foresight, in spite of all the recent investigations and reorganizations...
...History abounds with proof...
...A multitude of factors form the totality that shapes the future...
...Only two months later the Continent was engulfed in war...
...Yet it was not until seven years later that the War of Independence came to an end...
...The fallibility of prophecies in international affairs is strikingly demonstrated, too, by the fantastic errors of experts who have tried to forecast the nature of the next war...
...Yet what he actually can know is merely a small fragment of the total...
...But if it has failed where nobody could have succeeded??except perhaps by accident??it ought not to be made the scapegoat, burdened with the responsibility for a dangerous situation beyond anyone's knowledge and control...
...Within the year, the decisive battles of the Russian Revolution began under his leadership...
...To make an accurate prediction, an intelligence observer would have to know all these factors as well as their dynamics, their mutual actions and reactions, and so forth...
...Only the future itself will show who chose, among the many pos-sibleguesses, the right one...
...The answer is at best: very little...
...Six weeks before the Russian Revolution of March 1917, Lenin told a group of young Socialists in Zurich: "We old people will probably not live to see the decisive battles of the coming revolution...
...So esteemed a military analyst as General Fuller, for instance, predicted in 1923 that the decisive weapon of World War II would be gas...
...This is probably why, in the first place, the intelligence community paid less attention to Iran than it might have otherwise...
...But I know that even the best organized, most competent agency and the wisest, best informed statesman are up against the impossibility of knowing the future...
...Columnists have asked for the resignation of the CIA Director...
...The rest he must guess, and a priori his guess is not very much better or worse than anybody else's...
...Before blaming it indiscriminately, however, one should ask the following question: Assuming the outbreak of popular discontent could have been pinpointed, what could the United States have done about it...
...Perspectives THE LIMITS OF INTELLIGENCE by hans j. morgenthau The intelligence community in general and the Central Intelligence Agency in particular are being criticized for not warning policy makers of the disturbances that have rocked the Shah of Iran's throne...
...When Lord Granville became British foreign secretary in 1870, the permanent undersecretary reported that "he had never, during his long experience, known so great a lull in foreign affairs, and that he was not aware of any important question that he [Lord Granville] should have to deal with...
...Two days before the outbreak of World War I, the British Ambassador to Berlin cabled his government that war was out of the question...
...less than a year later Great Britain was involved...
...The history of these forecasts, from Machiavelli to General J. F. C. Fuller, is the story of logical deductions, plausible in themselves, that had no connections with the contingencies of actual developments...
Vol. 62 • January 1979 • No. 2
