A good friend of mine, who retired from U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command aka INSCOM, and I had a long chat today about “intelligence failures” while puffing on a couple of fine stogies. I realized that I needed to do a better job of explaining what I meant when I said last week’s Hamas attack was an intelligence failure. So let me break this down for you.
Intelligence failures can be characterized as follows:
- Lack of sources and information.
- Relevant information was collected but it was not read.
- There was intel, analysts looked at the information and dismissed it as not relevant or inaccurate.
- There was intel, the analysts tried to warn their bosses but the analysis was shutdown and not passed to political leaders.
- The intel analysts and their bosses warned the political leaders, but the warning was ignored.
Let me elaborate. Although intelligence agencies around the world have grown in size, that does not mean they have all information at their finger tips. If Israel did not have a reliable source inside Hamas and did not have electronic intercepts of Hamas leaders planning or coordinating an impending attack, that is how a surprise attack can occur. I realize there is a general assumption that Israel has the best human intelligence in the world on groups like Hamas, which has led many to believe that Israel must have known the attack was coming. But if they did not have any viable sources, that is one explanation of how they missed this.
There also is the possibility that there was a piece or two of intelligence on the impending attack but it got buried in something like a spam folder. Those who have never served in any intelligence bureaucracy may find this ludicrous, but it happens. My INSCOM buddy told me about discovering a NSA message on 9-11, after the planes had hit the Towers and the Pentagon, that was generated on 9-10 warning about the plot. It was in the traffic and no one in his office read it until after the fact. So there is that possibility.
Maybe Egypt did pass a warning to Israel. This probably would have been delivered in a written message as opposed to a phone call. It would not be the first time that an analyst would be skeptical of the claim because of the source (can you really trust the Egyptians, the analyst might have said) and because there was no corroborating information.
The fourth possibility is more ominous and my friend and I have both had experience with this. You see intelligence that undercuts the Government policy or the position of the nation’s leader and your bosses decide “not to rock the boat.” The story is spiked.
And then there is number five — the President was warned but ignored the analysis. I doubt this is the case with Israel. I am not saying this because I think Netanyahu would never do such a thing. He would not be the first to commit such a horrible error. If the analysts warned they will be up in arms and it will leak. I do not think Bibi has iron clad control over Mossad, Shin Bet or Unit 8200.
I do not know which of these five possibilities is what happened. What is clear, there was an intel failure. I am sure that you, my readers, have some strong views on this. Opine away.
Andrei Martyanov and I did a joint appearance on Wednesday on the DD Geopolitics podcast. We had a lively discussion.
I also want to clarify a headline that was making the rounds on the internet — Ex-CIA Analyst Confirms US Is Supplying Weapons To Both Sides of Israel-Hamas War. My words were taken out of context a bit. I was not suggesting that the U.S. knowingly supplied the weapons to Hamas. Hamas simply scooped up some firearms via the black market. As you can hear in the following video (I was interviewed on RT), I am reliably informed that some rifles supplied by the U.S. to other sources wound up in the hands of Hamas. Some have speculated that the weapons came out of the black market in Ukraine. Others point to the weapons the U.S. left behind in Afghanistan. And then there are the weapons the U.S. provided to the Palestinian Authority. Another friend who had some pretty good intel on this told me the rifles came from the Palestinian Authority. We will have to wait and see if anything else appears in the coming days and weeks.
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