Lacking Intelligence

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I'm clearly in the wrong business - I need to set myself up as one of those 'experts' the media is always quoting.  To be specific, I need to set myself up as an 'intelligence expert' as, right now, with the war in Ukraine rumbling on, they are doing good business.  This past week, for instance, we've had multiple outlets quoting 'top British intelligence' sources who believe that Putin is actually dead and his place taken by doubles.  All sorts of non-evidence is referenced in a desperate attempt to to try and convince us all that this entirely unsubstantiated story might have some substance.  The problem lies with the attribution: it is extremely unlikely that any actual serving intelligence operative would be divulging anything to the media.  For one thing, it would be a dismissable offence, for another, it would lead to prosecution under the Official Secrets Act.  The only way it would happen would be if it had been authorised from higher up - but it seems unlikely that anyone would be authorised to leak such an obvious load of old cobblers to the press.  The same sorts of caveats apply to former intelligence workers - unless they had very recently left he business, they wouldn't have up to date information and anything they did know would still be covered by the Official Secrets Act.

Moreover, just because you once worked in some branch of intelligence, it doesn't mean that, after you leave, you continue to have contacts there.  Quite the opposite - if you try to exploit any contacts for information, you will likely  meet a brick wall.  Back in the day, I was an intelligence analyst for the MoD for nearly a decade in the nineties - it was nothing exciting, just lots of desk work, analysing data and turning out reports that I suspect nobody read in full, if at all.  I remember that when the invasion of Iraq kicked off, we were warned about the multitude of retired senior military officers who had taken up gigs as media 'intelligence experts', who would inevitably be trying their luck by ringing any number they could remember and trying to bluff information out of the unwary by using their former military rank and sounding official.  Because that's the reality of these so-called 'experts' - they are chancers trading on their past, scrabbling for scraps of information they can pass off as 'intelligence'.  In truth, they might just as well make it all up - most journalists, let alone the public, are in no position to test the veracity of their claims.  They instead rely upon the 'expert's' supposed credentials.  Which is precisely why I should be setting up shop as one of these experts: I've actually worked on the 'inside' and I know all the jargon - I can sound pretty convincing when spinning some utter fiction as real intelligence.  Obviously, like anyone else who has worked in the intelligence field, I was only ever an expert on my particular, narrow, fields and, s soon as I left, everything I knew quickly became outdated.  But that just doesn't seem to matter in the world of media 'experts'...