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Another fiasco like 1973? TWENTY-ONE years after the Yom Kippur War, and the nightmare hasn’t vanished. The fear of another surprise attack is still very much with us. Today, with the national frame of mind turning to peace, the prevention of another surprise attack should be high on our list of concerns. What are the lessons of October 1973? First, we need a more pluralistic intelligence system, as recommended by the Agranat Commission in 1974 and only partially implemented. Which brings us to the second lesson, which is that in modern intelligence, the human element will always predominate. Vietnam and Iraq proved that. Technical intelligence, based on monitoring communications and satellite pictures, cannot supplant good intelligence people conversant with the enemy’s language and culture. With the virtual passing of a generation of Israeli Jews born in the Arab countries, we need to teach young Israelis Arabic, Arab history and the fine details of Islamic civilization. Failure to do so could result in a national deficiency, and the first victim will be our intelligence capability. We also need to improve our top policy makers’ ability to interpret intelligence reports. Much of the 1973 failure can be attributed to the unwillingness or inability of our elected leaders to interpret intelligence reports on the situation of the enemy and use the professionals’ recommendations as a basis for their decisions. Intelligence evaluations are not an exact science. They rest on intuition, experience and personality. And it is the intuition, experience and personality of our political leaders that ultimately counts in evaluating whether the enemy will make peace or war. To improve their decision-making, our leaders need to learn more about intelligence — its procedures, capabilities and pitfalls. Intelligence ought to be studied systematically; and yet the courses our schools and universities offer are insufficient. THE MOST important lesson of the Yom Kippur fiasco is the need to rely more on our assessments of enemy capabilities and less on enemy intentions. Capabilities can be established and evaluated more or less objectively, and changes in them tend to be gradual and reasonably visible. Intentions, on the other hand, tend to be subjective, temporary and volatile, dependent as they are on personalities. This is especially so in a region like the Middle East, where regimes are dominated by a small number of people in power, in some notable cases by a single person, as in Assad’s Syria or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. We don’t know what goes on inside their heads, and we aren’t likely to find out. Even if we did, they could change their minds quickly, literally overnight, with little or no warning that could be detected by even the best intelligence service in the world. Hence, we have no choice but to rely primarily on what the enemy does, and not on what it says. And we need to think about our own capabilities as responses not to enemy intentions, but enemy capabilities. All this requires creative and original thinking. To encourage such thinking inside the system, it is necessary to make sure that no single view dominates the intelligence service, to the exclusion of competing views. The Agranat Commission recommended a number of steps to improve the quality control of the intelligence process, and here there have been impressive and encouraging successes. Yet much remains to be done. We need at all times to cultivate a frame of mind that is critical and unafraid of orthodoxy or bureaucratic chains of command. Such a frame of mind is not easy to achieve in hierarchical organizations, especially in the military. Here again a collaborative effort between military intelligence and the universities may prove very helpful. Ultimately, in a democracy like Israel, everything to do with national security, including intelligence, has to rely on public understanding and cooperation. The public has to produce the people who can work in intelligence, and it has to create the means for political leaders to acquire the knowledge needed to capitalize on good intelligence. Such understanding was sorely missing in 1973, when the public failed to understand the nature, mission and limitations of intelligence, eventually leading even some top intelligence people to believe in megalomaniac, totally unrealistic definitions of their role. We need our universities, newspapers and other media to depict a sober and realistic picture of our intelligence services. And, of course, we need them to encourage our young people to go out and acquire the skills needed for good intelligence. We are a long way from having accomplished that.
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