Efraim Halevy [Mossad chief 1998-02]: In defence of the intelligence services

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.

Naturally, one should not conclude from this that the less you know, the better your judgment. On the other hand, one should understand that, although knowledge is strength, knowledge by itself is no guarantee of safety.

A second assumption relates to structures and the flow of information. There is the belief that the more the system is streamlined, the greater the possibility that the final product will be accurate and properly exploited. That better organisation is always desirable cannot be disputed; nor that a better flow of information can save lives. However, this in itself will never produce the ultimate panacea, and should not be a central focus of action.

A third element in the reports focuses on the danger of “group thought” and the tendency to blur reservations and caveats as the intelligence product makes its way to the top. Intelligence is not a science, certainly not a natural science. It is an art or a craft, and as such it cannot be governed by the basic tenets of logic.

Intelligence officers must be gifted with imagination and creativity, enabling them to peer behind the curtain of apparent reality. On this last count, the September 11th commission got it right. The commission spoke of a lack of imagination on the part of the evaluators. In the absence of hard intelligence, it is incumbent on the intelligence chief to try to imagine the unimaginable. But in the unique circumstances of September 11th, this was no easy matter. I will come back to this point later.

There has to be a clear understanding among the clients of the product that, in the final analysis, any institutional evaluation is a “group-think” effort. Officers can sit around a table and hotly debate an issue but, at the end of the day, someone has to be assigned to draw up a draft that is designed to reflect the mainstream consensus. If there is consensus, is this “group think”? If there is no agreement whatsoever, what benefit can a political master derive from receiving a paper with five or six conflicting opinions on a given issue?

After all, these are not academic exercises but action-orientated briefs. When there is no agreement, the time comes for an intelligence chief to step in and determine what the official estimate shall be. He could and should indicate if there are major reservations, and what these might be, but the ultimate responsibility lies with the chief. He must state his view and he, and he alone, must bear official responsibility for the estimate. Nobody else shoulders real and accountable responsibility, either for the estimate, or for the ultimate mistake, if it emerges that there has been one.

There is a fourth inherent assumption in the reports: that if it is necessary to collect information, it can always somehow be done. In other words, where there is a will there is a way. For a considerable period of time, it has been known and clear that there have been grave deficiencies in the collection of information both on Islamic terrorism and on the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

However, to do the intelligence services justice, it is fair to mention the enormous difficulty that must have been encountered in trying to spot, recruit and run sources in Iraq throughout the years when a virtual siege was laid around the country by the world at large. Similarly, the task of penetrating international Islamic networks was, and is, a daunting challenge .

On this latter point, it is appropriate to recall that Israel has scored singular successes in its fight against “local” terrorism. Yet one should not forget that we were present in the “territories”, the main breeding grounds of terrorism, for over 20 years, that we are still in control of large chunks of land and parts of the Palestinian population, that we enter areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority whenever we consider it necessary for the security of Israel, and that our close proximity to the territories has enabled us to make spectacular and novel use of a variety of our intelligence capabilities.

And yet, even so, the Israeli score on terror has become a debatable one. There are those who will say that the decision by Ariel Sharon, Israel's prime minister, to disengage unilaterally from the Gaza strip and an initial few settlements in the northern West Bank is in itself a triumph for the al-Aqsa intifada, which has claimed more than 1,000 Israeli lives since it began in September 2000.

The fifth assumption in the reports is that the failure in the collection of information, assuming that there was such a failure, was matched by a complementary debacle on the assessment side. I wish to take issue with these findings, on both subjects: terrorism and the WMD.

Three times within close to a quarter of a century, Saddam Hussein has attempted to develop capabilities in the field of WMD, with emphasis on the nuclear area. In the early 1980s, Israel destroyed his French-supplied nuclear reactor. In the early 1990s, the first Gulf war, launched after Iraq invaded Kuwait, revealed extensive Iraqi activity in all three WMD fields (nuclear, chemical and biological); the UN destroyed some of these capabilities after the war, and tried to monitor others before it withdrew from Iraq in 1998 and was not allowed back. And in the years leading up to the American-British invasion of Iraq in 2003, there was evidence that Saddam was trying to renew his nuclear and ballistic missile programmes, and to restore his original capabilities. Nobody outside Iraq knew how far he had succeeded.

In assessing the situation, an intelligence chief would have to give due weight not only to the current available information, but also to past performance. He would have to take into account indications of intention, and also the nature and known character of the adversary. And he would have to assess the significance of Saddam's adamant obstruction of UN efforts to renew its monitoring activities on the ground.

Obviously, he would have to take into account all the caveats and reservations of all the officers involved. But in the end he would have to form an overall picture, a credible view of his own, for which, as stated previously, he would have to bear full formal responsibility.

On the terrorist scene, it became obvious when two American embassies, in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, were simultaneously attacked in 1998, that al-Qaeda had entered a new phase in its war against the United States. This threat was clearly recognised by the American intelligence community. Serious collection efforts were initiated. However, I believe that if the Central Intelligence Agency had come up with proposals to adopt measures like those that were hastily implemented after September 11th 2001, the American public would not have been capable of approving them.

Even if the powers-that-be at the time had been as imaginative as possible, and if, for instance, the director of the CIA had publicly imagined the horror of a simultaneous attack on the White House, Congress, the Pentagon and the New York twin towers, I seriously doubt that the president would have found support for what was sanctioned after that fateful day.

I have reason to believe that George Tenet, the director of the CIA who resigned in June and left in July, got it right on both key issues. He correctly assessed the terrorist threat, and his basic approach to the Iraqi conundrum was similarly accurate. The fact that WMD have not yet been found in Iraq is no proof that there was nothing there; those who can conceal complete squadrons of aircraft in the sand could easily act similarly when it comes to WMD.

There is a sixth element in the reports which deserves mention and elaboration. There is always a unique relationship between intelligence chiefs and their political masters. The political master has to rely on his intelligence chief for threat assessment, and for the cautious and professional conduct of the service. There must be an unusual degree of trust between them, and it has to be mutual. This cannot be achieved and preserved on a purely formal and official basis.

I believe, therefore, that it was not only permissible but mandatory that, at a given moment, George Bush should turn to George Tenet and say to him something like this: “Listen George, let us stop for a moment and turn off all the audio and other recording devices. Let us talk a little maybe alone, just the two of us. I know that information is scant and incomplete but I cannot afford to wait around endlessly, years after the UN has left the scene in Baghdad. Tell me on the basis of what you know and what you feel, your gut-feeling and intuition: is Saddam into WMD for real?”

I do not know if such a conversation took place. I have certainly not spoken of it to Mr Tenet. But if it did not take place, that would have been a grave fault. Moreover, if such a conversation can henceforth never take place, then grievous damage has been rendered by the commissions that investigated intelligence shortcomings. The security of the United States and the world at large is that much worse off.

This leads me to another aspect of the reports that I believe to be of paramount importance: the treatment of individuals. For exchanges like the above to take place, there has to be a suitable climate, both political and cultural, that permeates the domestic and international scene. Mr Tenet was in office for seven years and his many successes cannot be publicly revealed. But there is one achievement of which one can speak: the rare knack he had of pulling together a genuine international effort in this third world war against Islamic terror and the proliferation of WMD.

American leadership in these sensitive areas cannot be taken for granted. Mr Tenet inspired the confidence of his subordinates and peers in all four corners of the earth, and this was a vital ingredient in the war effort. It still is. The manner of Mr Tenet's departure, and his public castigation at the hands of the inquiry commissions, will make it extremely difficult for any successor to lead the world in the clandestine war which is such a key theatre in the current international conflict.

There may be many individuals in far-flung places who played a part in some of Mr Tenet's real achievements who will in future think twice before committing themselves. I believe that on this count, Lord Butler and his colleagues performed a singular service in treating individuals in the British intelligence community as they did: neither Richard Dearlove, the former head of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (M16), nor John Scarlett, the current one, was held responsible. The committee understood its responsibility for the future, and gave this precedence over settling accounts of the past.

One of the principal dangers of inquiries like the present ones is that they focus on the failures at hand, making the necessary recommendations to ensure that such failures never happen again. They do not deal with future challenges, currently unknown. But it is surely these new and unknown threats that will bring about future intelligence setbacks. In these professional areas the reports are deafeningly silent.

Moreover, to the best of my knowledge, nobody came up with any new ideas as to how to collect information from countries like Iraq, or from targets like al-Qaeda. If the collection efforts did not produce the desired results, how should they be carried out in the future? Ideas like these would have given the Senate report an aura of genuine professionalism, which it now sadly lacks.

I cannot avoid the comparison between these reports and that of the Agranat Commision in Israel which investigated the failure of Israel's intelligence services to predict the Arab attack in 1973. The Israeli commission recommended the appointment of a special adviser on intelligence who would go through all the intelligence estimates, and would advise the prime minister on them. It was not clear if the adviser would monitor the reports, and decide which should go on to the prime minister's desk, or if he would add evaluations of his own. Only two people filled this slot for relatively short periods, and both left office in frustration.

Now there is a recommendation to appoint an intelligence “tsar” in the United States. In my humble opinion no greater mistake could be made so far as the intelligence community is concerned. If the new tsar is to assume command responsibility for the intelligence community, then he will be de facto director of the CIA and the other intelligence agencies in the country. He, and he alone, will be responsible for the content and standard of the evaluation. The professional director of the CIA will be responsible to the tsar, and the president of the United States will be functioning through a “proxy” on matters of war and peace. In intelligence, there can be no sharing in responsibility; it is, and will always remain, indivisible.

There are no “legal” rules and regulations in the dense field of intelligence, espionage and collection. It is not by chance that the international statute book has neither a chapter nor a verse on espionage, although this has been a vital tool of war from time immemorial. We are in the throes of a world war which is distinct and different from all the wars the world has hitherto experienced. There are no lines of combat; the enemy is often elusive and escapes identification.

The rules of war are incumbent on the defendant but not on he or she who attacks. International law, the Geneva conventions and the other well-known humanitarian provisions do not apply to the aggressor in this current confrontation. In circumstances like these, the future probably has in store crisis situations the like of which we have never experienced before. Rather than seeking long-term overhauling and restructuring of the system, and the creation of new high-level slots, surely this is a moment in history when the body politic should swing behind those who are already in the trenches and give them encouragement and support in this fateful battle that has been thrust upon us.

Those who have experienced times of acute crisis know that lines often get blurred and formal functions and positions do not reflect the real influence of various players on the scene. You will find political masters absorbing copious quantities of raw intelligence and forming their own estimates and evaluations of the situation. You will also find intelligence chiefs not only passing on information and assessments, but also advocating specific courses of action. This is simple human nature and no rule or regulation can change it.

This is especially so when the intelligence chief not only has his army of assessment officers but also has units and forces and assets directly involved in the conflict. At such a time, the attempt to apportion blame and responsibility between the political and executive levels of government becomes artificial and obsolete. They are in it together for better or worse.

In an ideal world, each player performs his part. In reality, personalities often shine way beyond their limited bailiwick. This happens more often than not when others melt into the woodwork under the intense pressures of war. An intelligence chief can never wither in the heat. Let us hope, for the sake of us all, that the inquiry commissions will not create a climate wherein the George Tenets and Richard Dearloves and John Scarletts of this planet will not be able to function. After everything has already been said, let us never forget that there are not all that many of them around.

Efraim Halevy was head of Mossad, Israel's intelligence service, from 1998 to 2002. Since 2003 he has been head of the Centre for Strategic and Policy Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Interesting article PING!

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i defend both tenet and butler. The top people are excellent.

I also defend the iraq war decision. In the aftermath of 911 and with inconclusive information on iraqi WMD's, we didnt have much of a choice.

i have never come across any intelligence people myself, but based on their analytical that occassionally makes it into the media and the constant string of terror alerts,

It would seem that intelligence agencies have excellent people at that top, but kids crapping down their intelligence cadres.

The people at the top don't have a choice but to base their decisions on the work of lower level operatives.

Bad analytical work at the lower level, leads to bad decision making at the top.

When i look at some of their analysis that makes it to the newspapers,

I personally don't think they are any wiser, knowledgeable or even more mature than tenth graders, based on the results they have achieved in the past 10 years.

i seriously doubt if these people are serious about their work. They seem to buy any islamic bull and crap, because they themselves are seriously ill informed about the issues themselves and the muslims then step in to disinform them.

These people then believe islamic lies, without even bothering to read the news media from the last 2 decades, which is often more objective because they see things with their own eyes and ears.

I believe these operatives don't read enough, worry too much about trivia and lose sight of whats important.

they also seem to be very bad judges of human character and personality, and too egotistical to realize that every human being is different and has to be dealt with in a different way.

if you could use the same method against every man across the board, they wouldn't have a science dedicated to psychology and human resource management.

I would grade lower level intelligence people as kids who don't know much international politics, human psychology to see things subjectively. Now if they also lack the IQ to see things objectively, you end up with a disaster.

Since they are not knowledgeable themselves, they have to rely on islamic word of mouth, which renders them into puppets in the hands of islamists who play them for fools.

i would say the same for mossad. They have been lied to by the muslims working for them, considering how helpless they have been against hizbollah.

i mean their commando parties have been annihilated by hizbollah in ambushes,their intelligence operatives kidnapped out of switzerland by hizbollah. their soldiers kidnapped along their borders.

The Mossad might be suffering from what we have been suffering, betrayals by muslims and the muslims walking them into traps.

how else could a commando party end up in a hizbollah ambush.

it might be their reliance on muslims that resulted in both mossad and western intelligence catastrophes.

We need to replace islamic translators with american translators and use muslims as minorities in teams, where the majority is made by either latinos or africans, depending on what islamic countries they are to operate in.

n my opinion, our low level intelligence operatives aren extremely ill informed, because they don't take the time to
learn things for themselves by reading on their own.

islamic liars then step in to fill their void with islamic lies. Since these people don't know any better, they go for
the islamic lies, hook line and sinker.

Even, if you have to read about the islamic world, why should you read an islamic author, Why not a western author, who
wrote what he saw, instead of a muslim, who writes to hide their failings.

In the absence of their own independent bank of information, these operatives have to wholly rely on islamic word of mouth.

They believe that pakistan had no ties to alqaeda, eventhough pakistan was feeding and arming the taliban, who were hiding
him. They believe iran's reform movement promises hope, when the protests fizzled out in less than 2 days.

They believed pakistan was a moderate islamic states, when it was harboring the taliban. lol While they were driven into a frenzy by the iranian reform movement, the iranians were busy building their nukes. the iranian leaders were moderate, even as they were dining with hizbollah and hizbollah was targetting israeli positions, while they were entertaining their iranian guests.

These operatives completely disregard their own logical faculties and listen to islamic lies, even when the lies are so flagrant that they are simply too comical to be taken seriously.

they are so gullible that they would believe lies which would induce laughter in others.

For example, if an islamic defector walks into the US,the islamists harass that defector to such an extent that he starts fearing for his life. they then tell these idiots that defector wants to go home.

Well if the defector wanted to go home, why was he in the US in the first place.

these people are such morons, that if an islamist tells them that a 30 yr old man has the mind of a little girl, these morons would believe it, disregarding their logical faculties. LOL. and start reading ' jack and the bean stock' to a 30 yr old guy..lol

An intelligence "czar" is a non-solution for two reasons. We already have a czar, and that is the DCI. If you don't trust your DCI, replace him with someone you do trust. Don't create another level and another filter between the president and his intel people.

Secondly, a czar has and will have the effect of giving more conformity and more consensus to the subject matter, making it more difficult yet for competing ideas to bubble to the surface. Our problem before 9/11 wasn't a lack of consensus, it was too much consensus. To get competing analysis, Bush had to turn to the Brits. Putting all of our intel capability under one man will make that problem worse, not better.

The best answer is for us to put a competent man in the DCI's chair and make him anonymous. He should answer only to the president and his senate oversight committee, and he should never speak in public, never be questioned in public. The politicization of intelligence has to be reversed, and making a "czar" who is a political creature is exactly the worst thing we can do.

Unfortunately Bush already announced the intention to put the "Intelligence Czar" in place...

I think many are missing the big picture. It is given that no intelligence can be perfect. Saddam bluffed that he has WMDs with the cards still not completely known. The reaction of ALL involved was essentially the same as it was 100% certainty that he had WMDs (ALL include Russia, France and mideast neighbors). That leads to conclusion that the deterrent value of WMDs may be achieved with phantom WMDs IF the bluff is not called.

We can't allow anybody to even entertain the idea of bluffing with WMDs again. It should be totally irrelevant if the claim proves to be right or wrong: you play the high stakes poker with WMDs' bluff in the situation when the perfect intelligence is impossible - you are going to be destroyed. Period. There is no other way: otherwise we are opening ourselves to a possibility of catastrophic attacks when we under-react or react too late.

One of my favorite writers Lee Harris said back in 2003 I think that it would be better that Saddam's WMDs are proved to be never existed: 1st as to disillusion the enemy that they can actually construct WMDs, no they are incapable of doing it; and 2nd - we prove our willingness to destroy them anyway if only they start claiming having WMDs.

Don't play with fire kids.

the intelligence czar is a good move.

He'd get information from different agencies, each agency employing different operatives and different analysts, to draw his own unbiased picture of the whole situation.

The CIA and other directors would get to work to deliver the goals, while the intelligence czar could set the visions and goals for them.

The intelligence czar could be like your CEO, setting the vision, with the directors as task oriented general managers with many project managers working for them.

it frees the directors to be more vigoroous in pursuing their goals, while it lets a person, who isn't bothered with operational matters or fighting deadlines to chalk out the vision and requirements for them.

However the core of any intelligence re-organization should include american linguists to replace islamic transaltors, so that we can take a look inside the islamic world with our own eyes, instead of the muslims painting us a picture with their lies.

operational teams should have an american majority driving an islamic minority. americans like latinos and africans, people who could blend easily into the region could work along with local islamic guides from the region. With americans in majority and the muslims isolated from each other, they wouldn't be in a position to lie or commandeer the teams to serve their islamic agendas.

one has to learn from history and be very careful when siding with muslims.

1- we got militant wahhabis, when we tried to contain shiites with the wahhabis.

instead of just one enemy, we now had two enemies, one of them of our own making.

2- We should never make a similar mistake again, by supporting the shiites or any other islamic group against the wahhabis.

3- We don't want to create two powerful islamic religious thoughts, when they are both equally opposed to the US.

4- Instead of supporting islamic religious sects, we need to get hold of islamic ethnicities.

These ethnicities like the kurds don't care much about either sects of islam. they don't care about the wahhabis or the shiites.

Now these are the sects that we need to bring up not to replace, but to break up the islamic sentiment and burry pan-islamism for good.

Shiites and wahhabis can hook up with other shiites and wahhabis, but ethnicities can't hook up with other ethnicities, because they don't share much in common.

5- As such all future efforts should focus on destroying both wahhabi and shiite islam and replacing it with a strong ethnic sentiment that would prevent muslims from teaming up with other muslims.

we need to encourage azeris, kurds and baluchis in iran. Sindhis, baluchis. and mohajirs etc in pakistan. With tribal or other similar measures in saudi arabia.

As far as pakistan is concerned, by making just the two provinces of sind and baluchistan secede, we could control the rest of the country, because this is where all of pakistan's seaports are.

You can control all of the iranian maritime traffic from the strait of hormuz. But apart from the balochis, most of the other iranian ethnicities are up north.

The only long term solution would be to give the different ethnicities their indepedence from these islamic countries, have them thank us for their liberty and then use them to control the region.

ethnicities like the kurds don't care about islam and they don't care about iraq. Loyalties of ethnicities in other islamic countries could be obtained the same way.

I am not very well versed with the saudi tribes, but since faisal united the different tribes to form the kingdom, i suppose it wouldnt be difficult to divide saudi arabia into small sheikdoms like qatar.

The article is a bit long for me to review right now. I had a hard day, and a touch of vertigo has revisited my inner ear, which makes me feel like an even older man that I am. I want those stem cells to shave about 20 years off my body, and I want it now. :)

The trick is to have internal competition, and a variety of opinions, while intelligence is shared. Just how the cultures will share intelligence without line authority to hire and fire and move dollars around via a title escapes me. I wish I knew more about how the military does it, but they seem to be beyond the enervating era when the various services undercut one another. Whether the 911 commission took a hard look at that model, I don't know.

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