[mhh__]

British Intelligence was a complete clusterfuck roughly until Peter Wright's generation came of age within the services and were finally able to institute things like Vetting(!!!!!!!!!!).

After that, however, starting slightly dubiously with Polyakov (Possibly a dangle) and highlighted by Gordievsky they were "winning". I don't have a citation on hand, but I believe Gordievsky stated that a set of diplomatic expulsions in the mid 1970s absolutely crippled KGB operations in the UK and the station never really recovered.

I personally just about (70/30) believe that Hollis was ELLI, it's just too good to be true with the lack of offical resolution and correlation with SONYA. If he was really a double agent, then the Russian's would have nearly had the heads of both MI5 and SIS in their control (Philby was in line for the throne).

I am currently writing a hands on (Zachtronics-style even, e.g. build your own https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)) dialogue-y game set roughly in this time period set inside MI5, I hope to be able to capture how crap they were.

[Retric]

The complete failure of British Intelligence to predict the fall of the USSR shows they might have gotten better at counter espionage, but still failed at their primary job.

The tricky bit isn’t collecting intelligence, the tricky bit is being able to turn raw data into something worth all the effort of collecting it.

[mhh__]

True, but economics predicting 2*n of the last n crashes and Noam Chomsky predicting 17 of the last 0 revolutions indicates that it's an impossibly difficult problem than mere incompetence.

SIS do not publish their archival material so we'll probably never know exactly which side of that argument they deserve to be placed.

[Retric]

Predicting the timing of a crash is basically impossible, but predicting instability is more straightforward. To use a recent example the US stock market basically ignored COVID until mid February, but in January people where talking about an economic risks of a possible pandemic and the signs just kept getting worse.