To: LindyBill who wrote (30942 ) 5/28/2002 11:19:46 AM From: Win Smith Read Replies (2) | Respond to Gerecht is quoted regularly here. On this topic, anyway, he gets to claim foresight, versus currently omnipresent 20/20 hindsight, by virtue of this July '01 article theatlantic.com . In his current position as pundit in training at AEI, most his more recent output is random "Arab mind" blather.Can't Anybody Here Play This Game? (February 1998) theatlantic.com The Agency knows that DO soft reporting on State Department issues often draws the ire of U.S. diplomats. Foreign Service officers who have access to clandestine-intelligence reports have long known that the CIA is poaching on their terrain. And as any Agency analyst will admit, the State Department and overseas representatives of the U.S. Treasury have generally provided the finest official commentary on politics and economics. Clandestine information from paid agents is by no means inherently superior to information from unpaid sources, as outsiders usually presume. Whether the subject is NATO expansion, democracy in Russia, Toulouse's Airbus versus Seattle's Boeing, the U.S. trade embargo against Iran, or the future course of South Africa, Kazakhstan, or Croatia, it has been diplomats and their contacts -- not case officers and their agents -- who have usually proved to be the U.S. government's most knowledgeable sources. But State reporting is not, like Agency reporting, appetizingly packaged in bite-size morsels. Diplomatic telegrams do not benefit from the boldly printed, highly classified code words that adorn Agency products. Bureaucratically inept, politically timid, and cash-starved, the State Department has rarely tried to take on Langley -- a rich and tough bureaucratic power -- for the DO's recruitment antics and shoddy reporting.
