It's a good question. I've grown jaded enough to have decided that, regrettably, I would have made pretty much every dismal, cynical, blood-soaked play the United States has made since the annexation of Hawaii. Taking it a beat at a time:

- The Yom Kippur War was a "failing" of American intelligence. At the same time, it was a "failing" 17 years after the Suez Crisis (in which the British, French and Israelis decided to invade Egypt against the wishes and treaty obligations of the United States) and a few scant months before the OPEC crisis. Tit for tat: (1) Israel is nearly wiped off the map by Egypt and Syria. (2) The US backs Israel after it's clear they're going to win anyway. (3) OPEC punishes the US in retaliation for not allowing Israel its objective lesson (4) The House of Saud begins a cabinet-level influence in US politics.

- Turkey's invasion of Cyprus was an excuse for the US to get rid of the government of Greece. The one they'd installed through CIA skullduggery had been pushed out by military junta in 1967; saber-rattling over Cyprus had the same pall as Galtieri invading the Falklands to stave off an Argentine coup in 1980. The Cypriot War was two NATO signatories battling it out, the Turkish being by far the most competent. The US really needed plausible deniability in this particular engagement and by pretending to know nothing, they got it.

- The Portuguese coup brought an inevitable end to a fossil regime that had kept a European nation in the Stone Age since 1936. Much as Mark Ames wants it to, Portugal doesn't matter on the world stage and hasn't since the Golden Age.

- the Tet Offensive was a military campaign brought about by a guerrilla army with little accountability to anyone. Realistically speaking, knowing what the Viet Cong were up to on a large scale is kind of like knowing what the Mahdi Army are up to on a large scale. Yeah, it'd be nice to know but an organization as fluid as ad-hoc jungle resistance is a tough target to get HUMINT out of. You sure as fuck can't wiretap 'em.

Don't get me wrong - US intelligence has had some astounding failures. One of the reasons I've made my peace with Dick Cheney is he was a Senator when all the spooky shit Saddam Hussein had the first time came to light. The CIA knew nothing about any of it at the time; when they said "there's nothing of consequence in Iraq" he had no reason whatsoever to believe them.

But at the same time, the 1900s were The American Century. That wasn't through luck; that was through some seriously shady but seriously successful skullduggery.