Mercury Rising: Making Hay Out Of Failure

During World War II, Winston Churchill sent a delegation of British intelligence professionals, including Ian Fleming (who would later turn his hand to writing spy novels), to visit the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover and to see if they could trust him to hold up his end of the deal in a transatlantic anti-Nazi intelligence network. They found him wanting and ended up going behind his back to work out a relationship with William Joseph "Wild Bill" Donovan, who they assisted in his running of the OSS.

Fast-forward six decades. Just as J. Edgar Hoover was in the habit of driving the UK's intel community nuts by making photo-op arrests of German spies the second they were uncovered on American soil, as opposed to listening into their transmissions and feeding them bogus information (a technique Fleming details in his James Bond short story "The Property of a Lady"), we now find out that Bush and his people have forced the British -- over the strong objections of the UK's intel community -- to spring the liquid-bomber trap far too early, thus allowing over half of the terrorists to escape.