Reading through the ~60 comments in this thread, I'm surprised that such a large number of HN readers appear so eager to dispute Gopnik's assertion that spying is probably not all it's cracked up to be. (Which is only half of his entire take: that, while spying isn't all it's cracked up to be, it's still probably somewhat necessary.) Not only is it not clear how many HN people are intelligence professionals, making a lot of the judgment here pretty speculative -- it points to a weird lack of civic, uh, maybe spirit is the right word: presented with some evidence indicating that the cloak-and-dagger people we permit to run wild in the shadows may not be all that competent, the response isn't "well how could we verify this?" but an odd faith that a hole into which we as a country throw piles upon piles of money without getting anything in return is actually running really smoothly, it's just that we the public aren't allowed to know about it because we haven't been given the access. It sorta bugs me: we allowed spies to run around in the first place; who's giving who access here?

A common response to the article is a sort of "publication bias" argument, that "well, we only seem to hear about espionage failures because the successes are likely to be kept under wraps." But I think this gives these people (intelligence professionals) a bit too much credit -- and looks weirdly obsequious for a such a garrulous, contrarian, and high-IQ group of people as HN. The intelligence community knows the arguments Gopnik's making (well, reviewing and making) well; they've been around for ages, as he states in the article. If there truly were reams of intelligence successes for every failure behind the curtain, you'd think the Caseys and Angletons of the world would be into some kind of decades post-facto program evaluation. Why not take the CIA's every move in, say, the decade 1946-1956 and tally the wins and losses? Surely this stuff could be declassified, right?

"No one will ever know all the times we've done our job well.. but every mistake will get us fd up the ass."* This may have been told to the poster sincerely, but man, I can't for the life of me come up with a better cover story for incompetence or sloth. I wish I could tell my higher-ups and funding sources something like that when they come asking if I've done anything well with their money lately. "Sorry, ma'am, that's classified." What a world.