Intelligence reporting

I try to pay as little attention as possible to intelligence, both because it has a solid record of being consistently and wildly unreliable, and because I've found--in my own brief ventures into that area of reporting--that intelligence sources are...consistently and wildly unreliable. After all, spooks can be both legitimate whistleblowers or professional fake whistleblowers or both. Kevin thinks that yesterday's ABC News Iran intelligence leak might be an example of just this sort of smoke-screen or double bluff or whathaveyou. I think he's probably on to something. But you just can't know for sure. And if President Bush launches a major investigation into the identities of the story's sources, well, that will similarly say almost nothing about whether the Iran ops existed and, if they did, whether they were disclosed to the media on purpose.