How spooks rate the spooks

http://iht.com/articles/64372.html

LONDON How fare the espionage agencies? Who's hot and who's not? Most agents and spymasters resolutely refuse to talk about their own agencies, but cheerfully rat on each other's intelligence gathering, evaluation and tradecraft. Time now for the Golden Cloak Dagger Awards, based on professional assessments by a half-dozen of my spooky sources around the world.
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America's CIA-NSA combine is rated by its peers as unrivaled in elint (electronic intelligence), shorthanded in humint (human ears in foreign ministries or terrorist organizations) and sometimes fatally weak on timely evaluation of data. Although it has some of the best analysts in the field, they rarely get out in the field and tend to skew their evaluations to the wishes of the director of central intelligence.Russia's impoverished spies, their morale bolstered by one of their own, Vladimir Putin, at the top in the Kremlin, have worked out a way to finance their operations: Using their old network in Iraq, they take fat commissions on illegal oil deals. This enables them to carry out their primary mission - stealing technology from the West - though Russian operatives are babes in the woods compared with those in the vast international Chinese network, peer-reviewed as best in the world at filching arms production know-how. Russia still excels at using United Nations cover, often through Scandinavian penetrations.
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Most-improved agency in Europe is Dutch intelligence, stunning others with its technical sophistication. In Germany, despite its failure to penetrate cells of Hamburg terrorists, is well regarded for its Cold War ability to triple double agents. Britain's agency, the one most trusted by the data-overwhelmed CIA, shines in the field of analysis.
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The growing terror networks in the Far East are getting fair attention from South Korea's KCIA, which cooperated with Singapore in uprooting a Hezbollah operation misidentified publicly as exclusively Al Qaeda.
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In the Middle East, individual Spook of the Year is General Saad Khier of Jordan, though no panel member is willing to say why. Israel's Mossad, is making a comeback after a slump in the past decade. The well-heeled gumshoes of the Saudi network, their loyalties riven by royal family dissension, are no longer at the top of the Arab field. Egyptian intelligence is more effective, thanks largely to interrogation techniques that some other agencies envy but cannot stomach.
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Syria, say members of the peer-review panel, is runner-up for the Golden Cloak Dagger for its post-Sept. 11 strategic coup. Damascus is said to have made a deal with the CIA: We'll help you track down Al Qaeda, saving American lives, if you don't give us a hard time on Hezbollah based in Syrian-occupied Lebanon, which costs Israeli lives. As a result, even though the United States solemnly tut-tuts at active Syrian support of these terrorists, Syria was not included in President George W. Bush's "axis of evil."
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Push the envelope, please:The non-judgmental Golden Cloak Dagger Award this year goes to Iran, guardian of the heritage of takia, the need to conceal, for sponsorship of its covert arm, Hezbollah, now spreading throughout the Shiite diaspora worldwide, from Lebanon to Indonesia. While Al Qaeda gets the publicity as designated global villain, the quietly metastasizing cells of Iran's Hezbollah get the intelligence insiders' acclaim.
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The New York Times