The Imperial Presidency

[MilkmanConspiracy]

A summary of Cold War intelligence I saw on Reddit once went something like this:

* Pretend to be competent, while flying by the seat of your pants
* Spend most of your time reacting to events at the last minute
* Meanwhile in Russia, everyone is also pretending to be competent
* Something goes wrong in Russia: oh no, let's not go to the gulag
* Blame Western spies for missing production targets
* Western spies don't deny the "victory", because why would you?
* This happens a few times, and Western intelligence gets a reputation for competence
* Actually commies are just incompetent in general
* CIA still flying by the seat of their pants
* Let's try psychic powers, maybe they work?

If you want the book version of this, I recommend "The Threat: Inside the Soviet Military Machine" by Andrew Cockburn. ISBN 0-394-72379-1