Monday, 3 May 2010

Glad? Well...

An otherwise pearling New Yorker essay by Malcolm 'superboffin' Gladwell, undone by these two clunkers:

As the political scientist Richard Betts has argued, in intelligence analysis there tends to be an inverse relationship between accuracy and significance, and this is the dilemma posed by the Mincemeat case.

As Macintyre observes, the informational supply chain that carried the Mincemeat documents from Huelva to Berlin was heavily corrupted.
and
...in this case Germany didn’t really act on it at all. Looking at that track record, you have to wonder if Germany would have been better off not having any spies at all.
--
P.S. When did the phrase 'rod, line and sinker' become 'hook, line,' &c.? Anyone?

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