To: The Sydney Morning Herald

Sent: Thursday, 17 October 2002 6:44 PM

Subject: intelligence failure...

Pity the poor bureaucrat engaged in the interminable triage of information snippets flowing across his or her screen and having to make incessant decisions on what to do with each single one of them. Another U.S. security alert: stay away from top tourists spots in Asia - sensible advice, in hindsight. But our bureaucrat is blase, perhaps bored; perhaps the attention wanders for a split second to the cryptic crossword, where at least the clues appear to make sense, sometimes...

The alleged 'intelligence failure' now being probed will doubtless identify the hapless individual, if only for the internal record, who chose to 'bin' the somewhat general alert at the push of a key. But the career consequences need not be terminal: my father was such a hapless bureaucrat, who was sitting in the Federal Information Office in Bonn one day in 1950 when the Hell teletype spewed out some smudged tape spelling WAR: North Korea had just invaded the South. Korea? Never heard of it, this francophile scholar must have thought; in any case, it can wait until the morning. And with that, back to the task at hand - 'foreign orders', in this case some welcome translations to help feed the family of six...

Chancellor Konrad Adenauer was livid with rage at not receiving the early warning, and vowed to have the head of the responsible official. The 'intelligence failure' was sheeted home to Herr XXX snr. Dire consequences threatened, but my mother successfully pleaded with Adenauer for a stay of execution. [The culprit] was promptly transferred to the Foreign Office, and swiftly posted to XXX as press attache. Other postings followed - a strange progression, for this former private who helped hasten the return of the Channel Islands to British rule, from one rightwing regime to the next more rightwing junta - and he ended his career as a minor-league ambassador.

So, here's hope...