“In my professional work with the Agency, by the late '70s, I had come to question the value of a great deal of what we were doing, in terms of the intelligence agency's impact on American policy.”
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There are so many things a large intelligence espionage organization can do to justify its existence, that people can get promotions for, because it could result in results.
Foreign Ministry guys don't become agents. Party officials, the Foreign Ministry nerds, tend not to volunteer to Western intelligence agencies.
The Soviet Union did not achieve victory over the West, so was my information inadequate to help them to victory, or did it play no particular role in their failure to achieve victory?
We had periodic crises in this country when the technical intelligence didn't support the policy. We had the bomber gap, the missile gap.