“Stalinist collectivisation programs hoped to make human beings as interchangeable as machine parts. People would become uniform, reliable and predictable. Rational principles would rule and technology would overcome human inadequacies. Norms, would be fulfilled with the individual’s importance minimized. Political reliability trumped genius – a suspect trait. Divergent thought equalled deviant thought. Anyone who resisted the judgement of collective would be eliminated. That is a near perfect description of the US Government’s approach to intelligence. Soviet collectivisation failed at a terrible cost. While charges of “intelligence failure” are often overstated, the US intelligence system remains disappointing. US intelligence agencies share other similarities to high-Stalinist institutions. Against all the evidence they insist that human beings are rational – or can be forced to become so. They are crushingly bureaucratic. Their faith in science and technology divorces them from the reality of sweat and blood. Originality alarms them. This industrial-age mentality leaves the US with an intelligence community that is far less than the sum of its exorbitant parts. The US has carried to a new level of perversity the Stalin-era conviction that humans can be turned into machines, accepting as an article of faith that technology is superior to humanity. The machines lost. Humanity is back, from the alleys of Baghdad to Darfur, from hate-fuelled madrassahs to mass graves. No machine can comprehend the ineffable complexity of the human spirit and the inexhaustible human capacity for mischief. For all its technological adornment, the post-modern age is a new age of muscle and blood. Yet, the way the US recruits, trains, utilizes and promotes intelligence personnel is based on industrial-age models. In the 21st century America’s intelligence bureaucracy embraces quantitative measurements, uniformity of credentials and conformity of thought, rejecting notions of unique talent, instinctive understanding or innate ability. If there is a single crippling failure within the US intelligence system it is the unwillingness to accept that intelligence professionals must possess special talents – “gifts” to use an unfashionable word. We accept that even the best-trained professional athletes were born with inherent skills, that concert musicians require unique talents, and that military leaders must possess instincts that rise above the common run. Yet the intelligence system pretends that anyone with a degree in international relations can probe the bloody gutters of the soul.”