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60 minutes recently released a big investigation on Havana Syndrome basically saying that the cause is real attacks by Russian intelligence agents and not some sort of psychosocial mass hallucination (which many have believed since these incidents first began to occur). They identify specific Russian agents and link their movements to occurrences of Havana Syndrome aka AHIs (anomalous health incidents). As someone who was unsure about what was going on here this seems pretty convincing: Russians have been using some sort of weapon to target US intelligence personnel.
The culture war angle to this is twofold. First, the US IC has seemed unsure whether these AHIs (which usually take the form of some sort of brain injury) were the result of Russian attacks. If this article is legit then these reporters managed to do a better job than the people we pay and give access to classified information to so that they can find out exactly these sorts of things. This is an enormous failure on the part of US intelligence services, its agents have been getting attacked, many have been forced to medically retire, and the organizations they belong to haven't even been able to determine whether an attack happened at all. To be fair, some organizations seem to have said these were likely attacks, others have said the opposite, so not every organization failed to the same extent in this respect.
The other culture war angle is that if this article is true, Russia has been attacking members of the US intelligence community for a decade. What will be the retaliation for this? US relations with Russia are already pretty bad, but this is quite a big provocation. Russia occupies a spot in the US culture war, I wonder if this will change that position very much. Is Putin still strong and trad? Can he get more reviled by the people who hate him? Most people seem uninterested in/uninformed about spy stuff so maybe this won't really register in the public consciousness.
This isn't as culture-war-y a topic as some, but I think it's interesting.
It is hard to believe that US intelligence is becoming worse. The recent events (Ruso-Ukrainian war, Crocus City Hall shooting) show that is has become better.
It appears that CIA has wide access to online communication worldwide and combined with modern AI technologies that allows to sieve vast amounts of information and find a needle in the haystack. A translator I had known got hired by a US agency couple of years ago. She has never spoken what she does but I suspect that she works on automated translation models for US intelligence. Currently we should assume that communication in any language is equally monitored and analysed.
Also, it hard to believe that if Russians really possessed such technology that many describe as improbable it wouldn't have leaked by now. Even best agents eventually make mistakes.
Russians have been involved in assassination in other countries, like in the UK. But we know that because eventually we found some evidence. It is likely that it could have happened in this case too, especially after repeated attacks in several countries. Unless, of course, CIA knows more about these cases but keep silent.
And third, why would Russians use this technology against targets of low importance instead of someone who really matters?
They missed October 7th, a pretty stunning lapse. They called the Russia-Ukrainian war but then they thought Kiev might fall in 72 hours (as did I tbh) - then they overcorrected and went 'yeah, launch this massive telegraphed armoured thrust into a fortified enemy with air superiority, they'll run and panic'. Then they went back and said 'oh you should've attacked sooner in a more focused direction, been more Western and less Soviet - the defeat had nothing to do with attacking while outnumbered and outgunned'.
Let's not forget the constant fumbling over their own feet on Russiagate. I would've thought it was pretty important to know whether or not Russia was 'interfering' in your elections so you could then provide assurance about what exactly happened. Instead they just spread confusion and distrust all over the place with endless dossiers - confusion and distrust in elections is exactly what Russia wants.
US intelligence is pretty bad in a holistic sense. They have excellent technical capabilities (finding things via satellite for example) but their ability to achieve positive results is poor. Why couldn't the CIA rustle up a countercoup in Niger and keep their huge base there? Why are the Russians of all people making gains in Africa?
Bad/good is different from worse/better. Besides many things you are demanding of them are not of intelligence but executive which belong to a completely different part of the government. I doubt that CIA runs the country. And it is good that they don't.
Intelligence/analysis:
October 7th. Ukraine war. Russiagate.
Executive:
Africa coup/countercoups.
There's more I could add - the FBI for instance has been mobilizing lone wolves, encouraging them to launch terror attacks that could then be foiled. This isn't really productive behaviour.
https://theintercept.com/2015/03/16/howthefbicreatedaterrorist/
US intelligence used to do quite a decent job. Coups and regime change, they got some wins down on the board. They got some high-profile Soviet defectors, funding Solidarity. A fair few failures but a pretty good showing compared to now.
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