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The obscure intelligence bureau that got Vietnam, Iraq, and Ukraine right

INR is “almost always right.” How come nobody has heard of it?

That led her and INR to "predict accurately that North Vietnam would up the ante in the South, increase its support to the NLF [the National Liberation Front, the political arm of the Viet Cong] and perhaps send its own troops to fight." The evidence that Hussein was reconstituting Iraq’s nuclear program — a contention that fueled Bush administration officials’ arguments for war, like national security adviser Condoleezza Rice’s famous quip, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud” — had two primary components. Philip Goldberg, who ran INR from 2010 and 2013 and now serves as US ambassador to South Korea, recalls the bureau’s terrorism section being able to tell him, in real time, the ideological motivation behind the 2011 Norway massacres and the perpetrators of the 2012 attack on a US compound in Benghazi.

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