One Little Faulty Intelligence Episode 

One Little Faulty Intelligence Episode

Matthew Wall has a nice piece on Slate describing various past episodes of "faulty intelligence." He steers away from the big ones, like the end of the Soviet Union, perhaps to maintain the Monty Python quality.

My favourite:

Grenada 1983 (ostensibly to rescue medical students--although I also remember Reagan talking about Cubans building a big runway for airplanes):

"The students were probably more in danger of flunking their midterms [than of being harmed because of a civil war]. The Grenadian government denied any hostage-taking intentions and dispatched police to protect the students during the coup. Since the medical school was Grenada's primary source of steady foreign income, the government had no real motivation to take its students hostage. British intelligence categorically rejected the possibility.

"The further failures of intelligence in Grenada would be comical were it not for the 23 U.S. combat deaths and the hundreds of Cubans and Grenadians who were killed. The CIA had no agents on the island, and the U.S. Army was reduced to using tourist maps. Detailed intelligence on Cuban and Grenadian troop deployments from the government of Barbados was forwarded to Washington, filed, and forgotten. The National Military Intelligence Center reported the medical students were all on one campus, when they were scattered at multiple locations. Consulting the medical school's catalog would have corrected this erroneous assumption; and while the phone lines continued to operate for the duration of the three-day invasion, no one in Washington thought to call the students (or any other Grenadian phone number) to find out what was happening."

This brings back the great scene in Dr. Strangelove where Peter Sellers, as a visiting British officer, is trying to get a coin to use a pay phone to say World War III is breaking out.