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Why the State Department's intelligence agency may be the best in DC - Vox

vox.com · 3,781 words · saved by 4 readers

Every American knows what the CIA is. I would guess that maybe 1 in 1,000 have ever heard of INR — the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, American diplomats’ in-house intelligence agency. But if you do know about INR, you probably know two things: INR is the Cassandra of American intelligence, and it earned that reputation the hard way. As early as 1961, INR analysts were warning that South Vietnam’s battle against the North and the Viet Cong insurgency was failing, and would ultimately fail because the Viet Cong had the support of villagers in the South. Their analyses prompted furious rebukes from the likes of then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. But they were right. In 2002, it happened again. The CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the rest of the intelligence community had concluded that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was trying to build nuclear weapons, which became one of the ostensible motivations for the US invasion. INR thought their evidence was no

Every American knows what the CIA is. I would guess that maybe 1 in 1,000 have ever heard of INR — the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, American diplomats’ in-house intelligence agency. But if you do know about INR, you probably know two things: It has gotten big stuff right when the CIA and others screwed up. When it got that big stuff right, no one listened to it. INR is the Cassandra of American intelligence, and it earned that reputation the hard way. As early as 1961, INR analysts were warning that South Vietnam’s battle against the North and the Viet Cong…

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