A true story I wrote about such a thing a few years ago, about my time in the Air Force:
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14 June 1985… I was a young Staff Sergeant working at the Defense Intelligence Agency. Friday afternoon I was told to report to the Pentagon Intelligence command post at 22:00 hours.
Earlier that day, TWA Flight 847 was hijacked by Palestinian terrorists. They killed a Navy Seal and dumped his body (PO2 Robert Stethem, lest he be forgotten!) on the tarmac in Athens and then flew to Beirut, Lebanon with all the crew and passengers.
My job was to be the staff NCO for the Intel Command Post set up for this event. I had to make coffee, empty ash trays, but most importantly, collect wire traffic reports off the teletypes and post them to clipboards on a wall (sorted by categories of various aspects of the event) and give them to the Commander, a full Colonel, if they were important. It gave me the opportunity to be a real part of the team, as the Commander knew me, picked me for the job and let me go to town by making decisions for him, sort to speak.
Anyway, we had some brilliant officers and civilians from CIA and DIA on the team… about ten people. There was an Army major who had spent a lot of his intel career in Israel and Lebanon who was absolutely brilliant. He used his knowledge well. When CNN showed live pictures of the plane pilots talking to the press from the cockpit window, he was able to name each terrorist (who were there) by sight!
After a day or two they took the hostages out of the plane. The major identified the vans they used from a rental company in Beirut. Later that night, about 6 AM, satellite photos came in that showed several similar vans now parked around the Coca-Cola bottling plant not far from the airport. Zing! We got them!
I was told to photocopy the images to large size and post them to big charts, and the Colonel and I, along with the major took them downstairs to the Secretary of Defense conference room immediately. I was hyped! I was involved in an operation that would soon see American troops rescuing hostages! My part was pretty simple though. Shut up and carry the posters!
So we go in and all the big wigs are there, including Casper Weinberger himself. I set up the easel (this was before PowerPoint and slides) and the posters on them. The colonel than showed them the satellite photos and said it was apparent that the hostages were in the bottling plant, and the plant itself was isolated so a strike could be easily planned and executed.
Then Weinberger asked how certain these were the same vans and could we guarantee it them? The colonel admitted he could not.
So Weinberger got mad and said unless we could he would not approve a mission at that time because “it would make the Administration look stupid and clumsy if we went in and “only liberated some cokes!”
A lot of decisions are made at the top that are based on politics and how the media would report them. Even the greatest men care about their reputations.
The next day the hostages were let go and the plane flew back to… I don’t remember but it was free. I was relieved after working 12-hour shifts for 7 days and got to get some sleep!
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In the end Rod, the intelligence agencies can know a lot but be overruled by politicians and high-ranking government officials.
I have seen this with my own eyes.
Now that you mention that it easily could have happened in this situtaiton.biden could have told cia to back off and had them tell mossad the same.it could have happened this time exactly as your example showed.
But..... I also believe that somewhere along the line some of the intel people went rogue. We have proof of that almost daily in fbi,cia and elsewhere. How big the rogue element is and how much power they have is unknown. But always has to be taken into context.
For me I can see obama telling obiden to order cia/fbi not to reveal any intel on what hamas has plans to do. Would not surprise me at all. Did that happen? Hard to say. We don't know. All we do know is that they are infinitely capable of getting intel on hamas and always have until now. Seems suspicious.
This is what is going on in Israel today with Netanyahu trying to rein in the unbridled power of the Israeli supreme court. Many lefties in Israeli upper positions of power, including the Military and other beurocracies are working hard to prevent Netanyahu from limiting the absolute power of the Israeli supreme court