Im curious, why not? I don't doubt the abilities of the US/five eyes intelligence community, especially in SIGINT, but they forgot how to face a remotely comparable adversary in a proxy war. They need operatives who are used to thinking ten steps ahead of a KGB trained spy, not radical Islamic guerillas.

I think the best analogy is the infamous wargame the US armed forces carried out in the 2000s. The blue team had an aircraft carrier and other cutting edge weaponry while red team had only basic equipment available to insurgents. The high tech weaponry worked just fine in Afghanistan but when faced against a comparable adversary (red team was led by an equally experienced general), the entire blue team was ripped to shreds by a few dozen men and some speed boats. Obviously the western intelligence apparatus is superior to Russia's but it has spent the last 20+ years focused on a completely different type of adversary. It would be like using an aircraft carrier to fight in the middle of the Himalayas.