How do you know that this is the only spy that was caught? It seems in the west's best interest from a propaganda perspective to paint the FSB in a poor light (to discourage cooperation), and they are obviously selective about what gets disclosed.
A reminder that if you want to live in a country where it is normal to buy a brand new assault rifle, 200 rounds of ammo, and go shoot it all in the same weekend, you CANNOT preemptively stop a mass shooter or wannabee assassin. Nothing he did should put up red flags in a private gun ownership country.
"A reminder that if you want to live in a country where it is normal to own an assault rifle..."
So there was no conspiracy, let alone a foreign one, for the intelligence agencies to have triggered on. This very much looks like a failure of the Secret Service agency, and it will be interesting to see what the final failure analysis looks like, and what they determine can be done better in the future.
And I think the "quality failures the rest of our government orgs are experiencing" is you projecting a bias. If you really think that things are going down hill, please find quantifiable metrics to show that.
It is suspicious that person who was radicalized enough to organize an attack on a president would have never said anything radical on the internet and not left a manifesto. A good guy that turned a killer overnight. Sometimes you wake up on the wrong foot ey.
Looking at the regular expulsions of embassy employees all over the world it should be rather obvious that there is a lot going on about which “we” never hear anything.
(By “we”, I mean normal people having other activities than following closely geopolitics. There is a lot of information to find if you are dedicated enough. A lot of misinformation as well.)