J Introduction The greatest derangement of the mind is to believe in something because one wishes it to be so. Louis Pasteur e leam more from our failures than from our successes. As noted in the V V preface to this book, there is much to be learned from what have been called the two major U.S. intelligence failures of this century—the September 11, 2001, attack on U.S. soil and the miscall on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. So this book begins with an overview of why we sometimes fail. Why Intelligence Fails As a reminder that intelligence failures are not uniquely a U.S. problem, it is worth recalling some failures of other intelligence services in the past century: • Operation Barbarossa, 1941, Josef Stalin acted as his own intelligence analyst, and he proved to be a very poor one. He was unprepared for a war with Nazi Germany, so he ignored the mounting body of incoming intelligence indicating that the Germans were preparing a surprise attack. German deserters who told the Russians about the impending attack were considered provocateurs and shot on Stalin's orders. When the attack, named Operation Barbarossa, came on June 22, 1941, Stalin's generals were surprised, their forward divisions trapped and destroyed.1 * Singapore, 1942. in one of the greatest military defeats that Britain ever suffered, 130,000 well-equipped British, Australian, and Indian troops surrendered to 35,000 weary and ill-equipped Japanese soldiers. On the way to the debacle, British intelligence failed in a series of poor analyses of their Japanese opponent, such as underestimating the capabilities of the Japanese Zero fighter aircraft and concluding that the Japanese would not use tanks in the jungle. The Japanese tanks proved highly effective in driving the British out of Malaya and back to Singapore.2 1 Yom Kippur, 1973. Israel is regarded as having one of the world's best intelligence services. But in 1973 the intelligence leadership was