Bugger: Maybe the real state secret is spies aren't good at their jobs (2013)
This is kind of a strange (though interesting) article. The headlining claim is that "spies aren't good at their jobs". But does the article support that?> The terrible truth that began to dawn in the 1980s was that MI5 - whose job it was to catch spies that threatened Britain - had never by its own devices caught a spy in its entire history.The whole article focuses on MI5, which I'm not really familiar with, and claims that their sole purpose is defensive, to catch spies, and not to spy on other countries. But almost by definition, if Soviet spies were left in high places for decades through the incompetence of MI5, doesn't that mean the Soviet spy agency had a pretty decent track record, either by luck, or by their competence in exploiting the specific weaknesses of MI5?I think it's more likely that the focus on defense is at fault, and not the focus on MI5 in particular. If you get a bunch of spies together, and task them with discovering other spies, then they'll probably find some people who may or may not be actual spies. The problem is in part that the base rate of spies is very low, but also that the people sent to spy in other countries for the most part seem to have kept a low profile (they didn't become head of MI5 or Prime Minister, for example), and also as the article states, that suspiciousness starts to crowd out your actual evidence.But get a bunch of spies together, and task them with gathering intelligence in other countries, and maybe they'll have a much better time of it, on average. At least, if this article provides me with a reason to think anything about this question, it makes me think that they typically were.So all in all it's a nice story, but it's not clear that the claim in the headline is warranted.