Im curious, why not? I don't doubt the abilities of the US/five eyes intelligence community, especially in SIGINT, but they forgot how to face a remotely comparable adversary in a proxy war. They need operatives who are used to thinking ten steps ahead of a KGB trained spy, not radical Islamic guerillas.

I think the best analogy is the infamous wargame the US armed forces carried out in the 2000s. The blue team had an aircraft carrier and other cutting edge weaponry while red team had only basic equipment available to insurgents. The high tech weaponry worked just fine in Afghanistan but when faced against a comparable adversary (red team was led by an equally experienced general), the entire blue team was ripped to shreds by a few dozen men and some speed boats. Obviously the western intelligence apparatus is superior to Russia's but it has spent the last 20+ years focused on a completely different type of adversary. It would be like using an aircraft carrier to fight in the middle of the Himalayas.

That's true, in a shooting war with a peer we haven't had much practice since Kosovo. However, neither has Russia, and while they have been putting on a show of force in Syria, that is basically them at almost max deployment and force projection capabilities. They don't have the money or manpower to fight a prolonged shooting war. John Schindler put it best, Russia is "Mexico with ICBMs". The ICBM part is what should scare us all, especially if they have a stooge in the White House.