The CIA Reads Newspapers

Do you have a feeling that intelligence agents read you. Yes, they do. Here's a CIA report on "open information" and secrets. CIA analyst Stephen Mercado said that some newspaper reports can not be credible.
"An analyst or policymaker often finds even accurate HUMINT a problem. For example, when an officer of the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence (DI), reads a report on a foreign leader based on “a source of unproven reliability,” or words to that effect, the dilemma is clear. Yet, the problem remains with a report from a “reliable source.” Who is that? The leader’s defense minister? The defense minister’s brother? The mistress of the defense minister’s brother’s cousin? The DI analyst will likely never know, for officers of the Directorate of Operations (DO) closely guard their sources and methods. This lack of clarity reportedly contributed, for example, to the Iraqi WMD debacle in 2002-03. The DO reportedly described a single source in various ways, which may have misled DI analysts into believing that they had a strong case built on multiple sources for the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.With open information, sources are often unclear. With secrets, they almost always are."
Maybe they know something we know, Vince. That the reliable source happens to be us. He he he . Read on