What countries have the best intelligence agencies

I don’t know if we’d actually be able to know this since a good one would probably keep it secret.

The reason I ask is I read in another thread that the south Korean intelligence agencies think Kim Jong un is fine but Taiwans agencies think he is sick.

Since South Korea has more motivation to keep track of North Korea than Taiwan I assume they are more likely to be correct.

But on that subject, do any nations have intelligence agencies that are considered the world’s best?

You’d assume the US does but in between the Iraq war, trouble finding bin laden for a decade and not predicting the Arab spring I don’t know.

If guess nations like Israel do because of how much threat they are under.

I have no meaningful facts to offer but I’d wager the US has probably the best world spanning network. We’re going to have some kind of intelligence asset almost everywhere. Israel certainly has a strong network of assets in the Middle East but can they tell you what’s going on in Columbia or Indonesia?

Also at question is the intelligence gathering ability of non-state entities. Many of the major drug cartels certainly have the ability to effectively monitor their territories and their customer’s homelands. It helps that they’re not even a lit bit shy about how they ask their questions and who gets hurt in the process.

I don’t know who is considered the best but I consider every British national to be a spy, so that surely disqualifies them.

If you were told, you would have to be terminated with extreme prejudice.

A competent conspiracy or spy shop employs distraction. Everything we think we know of a group or event is a false lead, a distraction. MOSSAD IS BEST or CHINA BRED COVID may be Armenian disinfo for all we know. If they’re good we’ll NEVER know.

Robert Anton Wilson IIRC said to consider an onion. Peel away one layer of disinfo, then the next, all the way down to the center - which is empty. Reality is elsewhere. We’ve been pwnd. In this model, the “best” intel service (if any) is something somewhere we’d never imagine, maybe a Bermuda-based bowling league. Didn’t think of them, I bet!

dupe

But what’s their motivation in what they’d choose to make public? They are not journalists. I would think that their primary concern is with stability, and I can’t imagine how a public announcement that they know he’s seriously ill when the N Koreans aren’t saying anything would be helpful.