For over 50 years, beginning as a U.S. Army intelligence officer, I have collected, processed, analyzed, and used intelligence.

As a Foreign Service Officer (diplomat), inter alia, I served in the U.S. State Department’s Intelligence and Research Bureau, and have held the highest levels of security clearances, including “special compartmented intelligence”.

I would not claim to have “seen it all,” but I firmly remember the basic rule of intelligence:

You measure capabilities, not intentions.

That is, you count tanks; seek information on aircraft production; measure the ranges and payloads of missiles.

But you do not attempt to state what possessors of these capabilities will do with them: That is, “What are their intentions?”

It is one of the hardest professional maxims to obey, since intentions can change instantly while capabilities cannot.

Historically, leaders have sought intelligence regarding prospective opposition.

Moses, on the verge of entering the Promised Land, dispatched 12 spies to determine the quality of the land and its peoples.

Ten of the spies returned saying while the land was fruitful, its people were so large and well-organized the Israelites would be defeated. (The other two rejected this assessment, claiming God would be on their side.)

Moses, however, was forced by majority opinion to decide the Israelites would stay another 40 years in the wilderness.

This was a bad intelligence assessment, costing decades of delay in entering the Promised Land.

History is replete with bad intelligence assessments. To identify a handful:

British judgment that the American colonials would be easily defeated;

Hitler’s judgment that the Soviets would be easily defeated;

U.S. failure to assess effectively intelligence indications of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour;

Israeli failure to determine Egypt would attack in 1973, rather than conduct another military exercise;

Kuwaiti failure to recognize Saddam Hussein intended attack, rather than merely to threaten, in 1991;

And most definitively and publicly, the incorrect 2003 U.S. intelligence assessment that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction.

The petulant intelligence community’s counter comment is their successes remain secret while their failures are all too public.

But that’s an excuse for failure, not an explanation of why it happened.

Thus the current contretemps over whether Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Moscow intelligence operatives, accessed Democratic National Committee e-mails and those of prominent Democratic presidential campaign officials, providing them to groups such as “Wikileaks” for release.

This to harm Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and foster the election of Republican nominee Donald Trump.

Some observations.

First, Moscow certainly has sophisticated electronic spying capabilities. So do a number of other countries, for example, China and North Korea.

Second, Russia (and other countries) had no special love for Clinton. For them, doing her gratuitous political damage would be a positive, regardless of whether she became president.

Third, it is a very substantial leap between appreciating Moscow’s and Putin’s capability to take such action and concluding they not only did so but had the specific intention of trying to elect Trump.

Thus, Trump is justified in his skepticism of U.S. intelligence reports Putin and the Russians were behind the hacked DNC emails.

One must point out that the same intelligence agencies now advancing these claims were unanimously convinced Saddam had WMD.

Nor is intelligence analysis a pristine effort by bureaucratic equivalents of technicians in white laboratory garb.

Intelligence gathering is akin to sausage-making and drafting legislation (if you admire it, don’t look too closely).

It can be strongly influenced by the political preferences of agency heads.

For example, one colleague recalls a CIA director entering the conference room where agency reps were hashing out an intelligence assessment. He personally directed a conclusion totally at variance to the consensus.

Consequently, it is not beyond skepticism, nor is it illustrating conspiratorial thinking, to wonder whether intelligence agency heads, all appointed by the Barack Obama administration, might lean toward a conclusion preferred by Obama and the Clinton campaign as a further rationale for her defeat.

- Jones is a retired senior U.S. diplomat who served as political minister counsellor at the U.S. embassy in Ottawa.