This may explain why there are so many misguided bureaucrats within the federal bureaucracy, and especially in the intelligence agencies. See extreme case of USSR deception by Kim Philby who was in charge of counter intelligence for MI6. He worked closely with James Angleton for many years. Ben Macintyre, A Spy Among Friends, Random House, 2014.
[From article]
“During the Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency bucked the law of averages by recruiting double agents on an industrial scale; it was hoodwinked not a few but many times,” writes Benjamin B. Fischer, CIA’s former chief historian.
“The result was a massive but largely ignored intelligence failure,” he stated in a journal article published last week.
The failure to recognize the double agents and their disinformation designed to influence U.S. policies “wreaked havoc” on the agency, Fischer wrote in the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence.
[. . .]
The agency’s ability to discern false agents turned deadly in 2009 when a Jordanian recruit pretending to work for CIA killed a group of seven CIA officers and contractors in a suicide bombing at a camp in Afghanistan.
In essence, this was the agency's own fault for developing a culture that placed a higher premium on saving the feelings of its career agents rather than protecting the agency from double agents. With so much at stake, you would have thought that the CIA would have tried to prevent this kind of infiltration at all costs. But bureaucracies have their own rationale, and even where national security is concerned, the bureaucratic mindset prevails.
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2015/12/former_cia_historian_agency_duped_by_massive_numbers_of_double_agents_during_cold_war.html
December 28, 2015
Former CIA historian: Agency duped by massive numbers of double agents during Cold War
By Rick Moran
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