Israel’s Intelligence Failure: It’s Not Just the Usual Suspects
It takes two to tango. Israel's intelligence failure and the Netanyahu government's policies are inextricably entwined. It's a lesson for Americans as well.
The jury in Israel and around the world reached its verdict before the trial was even held, labeling the deadly attack by Hamas on October 7th a massive intelligence failure. The facts on the ground speak for themselves, the intelligence chiefs have taken responsibility, and official inquiries eventually will get to the bottom of the debacle’s details. But even with more evidence certain to come, the summary judgment still conjures Claude Reins’ line as Captain Renault in the film classic Casablanca: “Round up the usual suspects.”
The unasked question is obvious: what role did Prime Minister Netanyahu’s relationship with his spies and analysts play in the intelligence disaster? When intelligence agencies deliver their assessments, how presidents or prime ministers deal with their spy chiefs, and vice versa, matters. The Israelis understand that fact all too well. After near defeat in the October 1973 Yom Kippur War, their intelligence reforms focused on the importance of providing critically reviewed, not consensus analysis to their key consumers. When the dust settles on October 7th, odds are the official post-mortems will do the same once again.
What went wrong on October 7th involved every element of the intelligence cycle. The details are far from complete, but many of the failings that explain the success of Hamas are clear enough. Most obviously, technology—Israel’s strong suit, the core of its 37-mile high-tech border fence, and the engine in intelligence collection blanketing Gaza—was its Achilles Heel. Capitalizing on surprise, the attackers battered down and flew over the “iron wall” after blinding its defenders, disabling communications links, surveillance cameras, sensors, and remote-controlled guns with low budget drones and old-fashioned sniper fire.
But their success wasn’t only because of vulnerable technology. Confident in their intelligence collection as well as border defenses, Israel’s leaders apparently believed they had Hamas fully monitored and contained. Not only did military commanders draw down troops facing Gaza; they disregarded last minute warnings from those who remained. As former prime minister Ehud Olmert told the Financial Times, Israel suffered from “overconfidence, which led to arrogance, which led to complacency. Hamas,” he said, “did to us what we normally do: surprise, cleverness, outside-the-box thinking.”
How much Israel’s strategic assessments misread Hamas’ intentions is no less important. Preconceptions that produced flawed intelligence judgments cost the Israelis 50 years ago. The Agranat Commission, the inquiry into the intelligence failures in the 1973 war, found Israel’s spy agencies had ruled out the Arabs opting for a surprise offensive. Their preconception assumed that the Arabs wouldn’t start a war they couldn’t win. The Israelis’ error led them to dismiss the warnings that Egypt and Syria were preparing to do just that.
But Israel’s spies and analysts weren’t the only ones who erred. Only weeks before the surprise attack, King Hussein of Jordan met secretly with Prime Minister Golda Meir. Hussein had just left a summit in Cairo with Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat and Syria’s President Hafez al-Assad who revealed the plan for the impending attack. Hussein had a record of sharing his insights, but the intelligence agencies dismissed his strategic warning, as did the Israel Defense Force (IDF) commanders. The Commission’s findings led to the resignation of IDF Chief of Staff David Elazar, and later Defense Minister Moshe Dayan and Prime Minister Meir. More to the point, the parallels with October 7th are noteworthy.
Last summer, IDF intelligence chief, General Aharon Haliva, and Shin Bet Director Ronen Bar, who heads the internal security agency, reportedly sounded the alarm. Haliva, in charge of Israel’s most powerful intelligence service, focused on Iran and Hezbollah, but his assessment cast a wide net. He warned that Israel’s adversaries including Hamas saw the protests over proposed constitutional changes roiling Israel including the IDF—unrest in the ranks, his analysis concluded, was degrading its military deterrent—as an opportunity to strike. Netanyahu didn’t respond, pushing ahead with the controversial constitutional plan.
Warnings from Egypt before October 7th described the danger in no uncertain terms. According to the US House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul, Egyptian intelligence officials flagged for their Israeli counterparts the threat from Gaza in the weeks before Hamas struck. The Egyptians’ alerts—including a message to Netanyahu from Abbas Kamel, Cairo’s intelligence chief, 10 days before the October attack—reported Hamas was planning “something big.” In addition to claiming Israeli intelligence never alerted him to the danger—he retracted his words—Netanyahu denies receiving an Egyptian heads-up.
Relations between intelligence producers and consumers, of course, are a two-way street. Policymakers set the priorities for spies and analysts and well as critique their products. A future commission of inquiry doubtless will examine why Netanyahu dismissed the IDF intelligence assessments and Egyptian warnings. Not unlike 1973, preconceptions doubtless played their part. Netanyahu, for instance, may have rejected evidence that contradicted the seeming success of his strategy in Gaza. There, supporting as well as slapping down Hamas has sought to keep the Palestinian movement splintered between the quarantined enclave and the West Bank as well as serve Netanyahu’s domestic political goals.
Haliva, Bar, and the Egyptians also conveyed a message about extremist policies provoking Palestinian tensions that Netanyahu and key cabinet officials almost certainly didn’t want to hear. Beholden to Israel’s far right, Netanyahu put needle-pegging political personalities in key defense roles. Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, leader of the Jewish Power Party, and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, head the Religious Zionism Party who also oversees West Bank settlements in his Defense Ministry role, are ultra-hardliners. If Haliva was delivering intelligence about their policies’ impact last spring and summer, it wouldn’t have brought applause.
Dan Byman, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, last month offered a view of Israel’s intelligence and potential policy failure. “(P)olitical leaders have a hand in shaping the threat itself. Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians and toward Gaza in general affect both Hamas’ intent and capability as well as the attitude of ordinary Palestinians.” How the Netanyahu’s policies may have shaped Hamas’ actions, he wrote, is “an assessment of one’s own government that is politically fraught for any intelligence agency.”
Writing nearly four decades ago in the IDF Journal, a publication of the Israel Defense Forces, Colonel Shmuel Limone presented a perspective on the intelligence reforms that followed the 1973 War. A highly respected intelligence officer, the now retired intelligence analyst examined in depth one of the reforms: the creation of the IDF Intelligence Department’s Review Section, its so-called “Devil’s Advocate” shop.
Founded to ensure the most critical issues involving war and peace received professional scrutiny from experienced analysts who had access to all the relevant intelligence and to the country’s senior-most leaders, the Review Section, Limone explained, needed to have a sharply limited role.
“The use of the Devil’s Advocate function must be reserved almost exclusively to truly critical events. It came into being for one express purpose: to warn against war when a whole system dismisses such a probability, and that has continued to be its raison d'être ever since.” Reviewing its then ten-year history he wrote, “The various Devil’s Advocates who have manned this position over the years have been sparing in their use of this aspect of the Review.”
Did Israel’s intelligence services and the Netanyahu government have an opportunity to reassess their perspectives and policies in time to repair Israel’s vulnerabilities before the Hamas attack? Should the rising tensions with Hezbollah, on the West Bank, and in Gaza as well as Egypt’s warnings have triggered a review and regrouping? Should they have availed themselves of the Review Section’s role?
Reflecting on a different war and its lessons, Limone, himself a former Devil’s Advocate, put it this way. “The role of opposing estimates is justified, even if not even one of them will ever be proven correct. The Devil’s Advocate needs to be right only once to justify his existence.”
Republished in CIA’s Studies in Intelligence in 1985 and later declassified, his essay, “The Imperative of Criticism,” should be required reading for the Agranat Commission’s successor when it investigates October 7th.