Joshua Foust is really brutal in his response to the news that the U.S. military was negotiating with a high-level Taliban official who turned out to be an impostor:
Think about this for a moment: a man whose identity no one was able to verify was flown, by NATO, for face-to-face meetings with high-ranking members of the coalition (though Karzai denies having met Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, the impersonated Taliban leader in question). We don't know what his intentions were, nor do we know what information he may have stolen for whatever his ultimate goals are. We can speculate all we want about what really happened: the impostor was out to grab cash ("we gave him a lot of money," one U.S. official lamented), he was an ISI agent sent to penetrate the negotiations process, and so on. But no matter how we spin it, this is hugely embarrassing for ISAF, for the war, and for any prospects of ending it soon.
Mullah Omar, who leads one group of Taliban fighters based in Quetta, has insisted from the beginning that the talks last month were not taking place. At the time, Filkins had written that Omar was being "explicitly being cut out" of the talks. Now, it seems that is because the talks weren't really occurring.
Based on Tim Weiner's history of the CIA, this sort of thing is not an unprecedented setback in American intelligence gathering. From the book:
The more his spies spent on intelligence, the less valuable it became. "If there are more graphic illustrations of throwing money at a problem that hasn't been thought through, none come to mind," [Former Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms] wrote. What passed for intelligence on the Soviets and their satellites was a patchwork of frauds produced by talented liars.
Helms later determined that at least half of the information on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the CIA's files was pure falsehood. His stations in West Berlin and Vienna had become factories of fake intelligence. Few of his officers or analysts could sift fact from fiction. It was an ever-present problem: More than half a century later, the CIA confronted the same sort of fabrication as it sought to uncover Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
There seems to be a fairly consistent theme here involving leadership seeing what they want to see.
