It seems that they were going off circumstantial and presumptive intelligence while the Anglo intelligence was actual intelligence.
If so, they tells us two things:
- Continental intelligence gathering ability is not that good.
- Continental intelligence are too willing to go on poor intelligence.
They had access to US intel. Not to all of it, evidently, but enough to create an assessment.
Seems to me like they fell victim to an unfortunate logic flaw called "hyper-rationalism". The idea that a) every political decider is pursuing avenues of action that are always in their best interest; b) every political decider has access to clear and untampered information; c) every leader uses a prudential stratagem when taking action (favoring minimizing risk over maximizing outcome).
We now know that Putin is a senile revanchist cretin, his coterie of sycophants fed him garbage info, in order to conceal their own grift, and absolutely nobody in the entire chain of command gives one fuck about the lives of common troopers (though the last one is a time-honored Russian tradition across all eras).
This is something Carlo Cipolla tangentially wrote about, in his laws about human stupidity. His take was that smart people almost always underestimate both the prevalence of imbeciles, and their power (be it political, economic, etc).
Continental analysts made the exact mistake Stalin made when notified that Hitler was about to invade: they didn't believe Putin was idiotic enough to try. Of course, also tainted by a certain snootiness towards US intel (which, admittedly, did produce a few notable duds throughout time).