The Korean War was marked by two major episodes of strategic surprise: North Korea's invasion of the South and China's subsequent intervention. Despite the United States’ intensified intelligence efforts to assess threats to U.S. and South Korean forces after the outbreak of war, it failed to anticipate or prepare for China's offensive. This study views China's intervention as a distinct case of intelligence failure, separate from the initial surprise of North Korea's invasion, and aims to identify the stages at which the failure occurred within the framework of the intelligence cycle-direction, collection, analysis, and dissemination. The analysis finds that the root cause of failure lay not in the limits of intelligence collection, but in the absence of strategic direction and the lack of internal mechanisms for self-assessment within the intelligence process. Furthermore, by illuminating the interaction between intelligence and political judgment in shaping strategic surprise, this study contributes to understanding how leaders interpret warnings under conditions of uncertainty and high risk.