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Welcome to the watch floor. I'm Sarah Adams. Every time a crisis hits, be it Ukraine, Iran, Syria, terrorism, the same question pops up. Did intelligence fail? And almost every time that question is asked by people judging intelligence by the wrong standard, some of the most important CIA successes are actually viewed as fail because success takes time. And when you're not viewing it from kind of the lens in which the standards exist, you see, these operations are criticized, they're dismissed. Heck, some are even buried. But decades later, you really start to see the landscape that they shaped. How wars were avoided, how threats were disrupted, you know, and how adversaries really got boxed in over time. Today we're going to talk about CIA's law, long game, older operations that most people misunderstand, but they're still producing strategic wins Today. Before we get into operations, we need to set expectations. Because if you don't understand how intelligence works, everything we're going to talk about today really does sound like failure. That's no joke. Intelligence doesn't work alongside election cycles or to mirror news cycles. And it definitely doesn't work. Like Hollywood portrays. There are three rules that help define whether your intelligence operation is really a success. The first rule is delay beats denial. People think success means stopping something completely, right? There's no attack, there's no nuclear program. There was no progress made by the Chinese on hypersonics. That unfortunately is just not how the real world works. Think of it like a house fire. So it's really great if firefighters can just go in and put it all out quickly. But if they put out enough of the fire to save the lives inside, that's still a success. Intelligence works the exact same way. It slows momentum, it forces detours, and it buys time. If a nuclear program takes 10 years instead of three, that gives you seven more years for diplomacy, pressure to place in different deterrence. None of that time would have existed otherwise. Time is the most valuable commodity intelligence buys. The second rule is the one people struggle with the most. Behavioral change matters more than public outcomes. Most people judge success by exactly what they can see. A regime change, arrests, you stop that explosion from happening. Intelligence professionals judge success by what the adversary actually stopped doing. How did you impact them? A great example is of course the shoe bomb. The shoe bomb had kind of a fault in its design where moisture got in so it didn't go off. Well, the tear eyes could fix that problem very quickly. But the US leaned in and they put a lot of this extra screening in place. And to where? The terrace. It's not worth doing the shoe bomb, because the security is too enhanced to use it, so they took it completely off the table. That's a win. Unfortunately, about six months ago, we started decreasing the standards to scan shoes again. The terrorists now have a new shoe bomb going through the testing phases. So the shoe bomb's coming back. Unfortunately, you can have a win and then changes over time or people forgetting how that win works leads to other faults. And we have to keep that in mind. Now think of it like this. You go park in a bad neighborhood and you lock your car because you obviously don't want it to get robbed. So if it doesn't get robbed, you don't exactly know if it's because you locked your car. But if that whole street stops getting robbed, that is a change in behavior, right? That could be a success of everybody locking their cars on the street and not making it a soft target anymore. So it was like when terrorists knew they were being tracked via phones and they stopped using them. They controlled and restricted their movements and then they really stopped trusting each other. That's like intelligence pressure. That was a success against them. You know, another thing is like if you make a nation state slow down their decision making processes, they harden the their facilities, they second guess escalation with you. All of that is intelligence shaping behavior. The biggest intelligence successes look so boring from the outside. The third rule, you know, is a bit uncomfortable, but it matters. Strategic warning is the success, even if leadership ignores it. Intelligence doesn't make decisions, it only informs them. Think of this, you're a meteorologist, you predict a hurricane's coming. People don't evacuate. Your strategic warning was correct. Their decision is what's wrong, that's not on you. You fulfilled your warning. That was your role. Leaders choose to do what they want to do and that's completely outside of the control of intelligence. You just give them the best information available possible at the time for them to make the decision. It doesn't actually stop a surprise or anything like that. It just helps reduce some of the risk. But they never completely go away. There is a human element involved in all of this. Now once you understand these three rules, the so called CIA failures we start to talk through now, they're going to look different to you. We're going to walk through some of the strongest examples of that and then tie it to present day and how you might see a similar operation play out. The first example is in the early 1950s. Berlin of course was divided and there were intelligence officers everywhere trying to collect information. Of course with Soviets did is they relied very heavily on landlines. And then they buried the cables, obviously all over East Berlin so their military forces and their intelligence officers could communicate with each other. So the CIA, in working with British Intelligence, started the operation Operation Gold. And that's when they dug the tunnel under the Berlin Wall and tapped into these cables.