American intelligence services did a much better of analyzing Russian intentions in the weeks leading up to Mr. Putin’s War than their Continental colleagues. For example, the head of the German spy service was in Kiev when the shooting started and had to drive to Poland in a two-day long traffic jam. From the Wall Street Journal:

Bruno Kahl, head of the foreign intelligence service BND, found himself unable to fly back to Berlin after the start of the offensive, highlighting the low-risk assessment of the German and other European intelligence services about the potential for an invasion of Ukraine, which left many capitals largely unprepared for the war despite weeks of warnings from U.S. and U.K. intelligence.

Mr. Kahl had to travel by road from Kyiv to the Polish border, which he crossed only on Friday after a slow drive alongside thousands of refugees trying to flee the fighting, a spokesman for the intelligence agency said.

In my November 21, 2001 review of the movie Spy Game, I pointed out a problem faced by American spooks as the targets of interest changed from Eastern Europeans to Third Worlders after 1991:

If all CIA covert operatives look like Robert Redford and Brad Pitt, the stars of the snazzy but brainless “Spy Game,” it’s no wonder our spooks have proven so ineffectual ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall deprived them of a blond enemy they could infiltrate.

I last saw Redford play a CIA man outwitting his heartless Agency superiors in 1975’s “Three Days of the Condor.” In the quarter century since, my own hair has deteriorated sadly. Yet, I’m happy to say, not a hair on Redford’s 64-year-old head has changed, other than that the passing decades seem to have infused each gleaming lock with even more body.