Every year, the heads of the key US intelligence agencies take part in a ritual called the worldwide threat brief, testifying before Congress at an unclassified level about the biggest perils facing the nation. In general, we know what to expect: warnings on China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, cybercrime, terrorism and other usual suspects.
But this year things turned out very differently, in two ways. First, the debate was hijacked — appropriately — by the uproar over the inadvertent release to a journalist, through the communications app Signal, of details concerning strikes against Houthi terrorists. The director of national intelligence, ...