On Intelligence-The Spy Kind!

[Annie]

Damn, this is good!

The Economist

Efraim Halevy

In defence of the intelligence services

Jul 29th 2004

The committees of inquiry into American and British intelligence failures may have left the West less secure, argues Efraim Halevy, an ex-chief of Mossad

WHEN commissions of inquiry investigate intelligence failures of extraordinary magnitude, their conclusions inevitably have an overwhelming influence on the conduct of intelligence chiefs and their political masters for generations to come. Whatever the practical steps taken by the powers-that-be to implement this or that recommendation of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the September 11th commission, and the British committee headed by Lord Butler, the language and rhetoric of these documents are destined to have an enormous impact on the manner in which world leaders, both in intelligence and in politics, will perform in times of crisis and war. Several assumptions and concepts, implicit or explicit in the reports, warrant close study.

There is an inherent understanding in the findings that the shortage of information on the threats—from Islamic terrorism and from Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD)—was at the root of the intelligence breakdown on these two fronts. It seems only logical that the more you know, the safer you are and the greater the chance that you will get things right.


Yet Israel's most costly and fateful failure was its mistaken estimate of Egyptian and Syrian intentions, on the eve of the Yom Kippur war in 1973, when the two armies unexpectedly attacked Israel in a bid to regain the territories lost in the 1967 war. At the time, Israel had it all: superior intelligence coverage, excellent human resources with good access, high-level and discreet dialogue with more than one Arab or Muslim leader, and an intelligence-evaluation arm that had provided an early warning several months before the war, thus preventing it from breaking out at that time. But despite all of the above, we got it all wrong. The abundance of information led us to intelligence “hubris”: we trusted our superior analytical prowess rather than ominous indicators on the ground.

Keep in mind they 'won' that war...