{"id":1371743,"date":"2023-12-05T06:50:47","date_gmt":"2023-12-05T06:50:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/?p=306863"},"modified":"2023-12-05T06:50:47","modified_gmt":"2023-12-05T06:50:47","slug":"israels-intelligence-failure-worse-than-we-thought","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2023\/12\/05\/israels-intelligence-failure-worse-than-we-thought\/","title":{"rendered":"Israel\u2019s Intelligence Failure: Worse Than We Thought"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Image by Levi Meir Clancy.<\/p><\/div>\n

Turns out that over a year before the Hamas attack, Israeli intelligence secured multiple documentation that gave a detailed account on what Hamas would do Oct. 7. But the Israelis discounted the plan as being unrealistic and therefore not worth planning to counteract. What accounts for that reaction?<\/p>\n

Intelligence failures are usually of three types: missed signals, mishandled signals, and discounted signals. Most common are the first type: failures to detect the signs of major changes, such as a regime\u2019s imminent demise (the USSR, 1989), a sudden transfer of power (Iran, 1978), or a military plan gone awry (the Bay of Pigs invasion, 1961).<\/p>\n

Next are failures due to bureaucratic malfunction, such as the multiple agency missteps in the leadup to the 9\/11 attacks. Last, and worst of all, are failures to heed multiple warning signs even though recognized as such. The surprise attacks on Pearl Harbor and on Israel by Egypt and Syria in October 1973 are examples.<\/p>\n

When Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, many analysts saw the intelligence failure as a Type 1 matter: Israel\u2019s intelligence community just didn\u2019t see it coming and so didn\u2019t prepare for it. But now we have documentation that in fact the failure was Type 3: The intelligence community had the data but chose to ignore it: a complete roadmap of Hamas\u2019 attack plans more than a year before October 7.<\/p>\n

It knew exactly what Hamas would do, and while it did not know when, it knew where and how\u2014in other words, Pearl Harbor and Egypt-Syria times 10. When a colonel in the IDF\u2019s Gaza division said Hamas had conducted exercises based on the roadmap, she was brushed off.<\/p>\n

From the New York Times report of this documentation, it seems that the basic reason for this intelligence failure was the analysts\u2019 hubris: the belief Hamas was incapable of pulling off such a detailed and imaginative attack. This conclusion should be particularly anguishing to Israelis because in 1973, as a CIA review determined, Israeli (and US) intelligence had \u201cplentiful, ominous, and often accurate\u201d information suggesting an attack.<\/p>\n

Yet the information was not taken seriously, the warnings were not heeded, and the thinking of Israel\u2019s enemies was misinterpreted. \u201cThey would not dare\u201d seemed to be behind Israel\u2019s and the US\u2019s assessment\u2014hence a surprise attack that, as on October 7, should not have been.<\/p>\n

It might be argued on behalf of these very costly intelligence failures that the abundance of warning signs was obscured by other information that did not suggest an attack. This is the phenomenon of noise, spelled out in Roberta Wohlstetter\u2019s classic study, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision.<\/p>\n

But as her study found, flawed thinking about Japan\u2019s willingness to go to war with the US was a key error that undercut intelligence officers\u2019 ability to separate noise from warning signs. They thought Japan knew it could not win such a war and therefore would not attack US forces.<\/p>\n

Israeli thinking about Hamas seems to have followed the same track, with disastrous consequences.<\/p>\n

The post Israel\u2019s Intelligence Failure: Worse Than We Thought<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Turns out that over a year before the Hamas attack, Israeli intelligence secured multiple documentation that gave a detailed account on what Hamas would do Oct. 7. But the Israelis discounted the plan as being unrealistic and therefore not worth planning to counteract. What accounts for that reaction? Intelligence failures are usually of three types: More<\/a><\/p>\n

The post Israel\u2019s Intelligence Failure: Worse Than We Thought<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":404,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,204],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1371743"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/404"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1371743"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1371743\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1371744,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1371743\/revisions\/1371744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1371743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1371743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1371743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}