ABSTRACT
Washington analysts failed to predict Perón’s ouster, believing almost till the end that the evidence pointed toward regime stability. There were other narratives that went to the contrary, including reports from predecessors a decade before and diplomatic cables from the field. The problem was that those alternative accounts relied on intangible, unquantifiable factors – atmospherics and anecdotes of everyday people in Argentina or the subjective opinions of previous analysts. This case study concerns a complex, multilayered problem that is far more representative of typical analytical work, and the intelligence failure in this instance involved the analysts’ inability to look beyond mere facts toward the more important elements of sign, narrative and temporality.
