"A n army without secret agents", Sun Tzu observed 2,500 years ago in "The Art of War", "is exactly like a man without eyes and ears." From Moses and Caesar to Churchill and Stalin, rulers have made use of spies to ferret out useful information about their opponents, both at home and abroad. Yet even as governments have built up their intelligence services, they have cursed the failings of their spies: their cost, their tendency to break the law and, above all, their habit of getting things wrong. America's and Britain's spying operations both stand cursed at the moment (see page 29). Two years after the Iraq war began, both services are guilty first of supplying faulty information about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and then of letting that information be exaggerated, or at least simplified, by their political masters. America's vast security apparatus also failed to prevent the September nth atrocity. Add in other errors from the not-so-recent past-the failure to foresee the end of the Soviet Union or that India and Pakistan would go nuclear-and these intelligence systems look dangerously accident-prone.
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