Failures in National Intelligence Estimates: The Case of the Yom Kippur War

Key takeaways

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Reading notes

• FORMER Israeli Chief of Staff, Lieutenant-General Chaim Bar- Lev, divides strategic surprise or surprise at war into three types: surprise in method, surprise in place, and surprise in time.' According to Bar-Lev, in October i973 the only type of surprise achieved by the Arabs concerned the timing of the attack. But it is arguable that Israel was taken by surprise in all three
• e Israeli armed forces were not adequately prepared for the dense deployment of antiaircraft and antitank mis- siles by the Egyptians and the Syrians, nor were they fully equipped for an amphibious crossing
• But it should be recalled that Israel's official theory of "secure borders" precluded the possibility of an attack. The theory assumed that the June i967 borders were so secure that an enemy attack was bound to fail, and that this would deter the enemy from launching a full-scale war in the first place. Seen in this perspective, Israel was surprised not only by the timing, but also by the method and place of the Yom Kippur attack.
• When a nation suffers such setbacks as a result of being caught un- prepared, a search for scapegoats frequently takes place; the blame is often laid at the door of the intelligence community. After the defeat of June i967, for example, President Nasser dismissed the Egyptian intelligence chief although all the evidence indicates that a first strike by Israel was an integral part of Nasser's strategy. Following the Yom Kippur War, the Israeli Director of Military Intelligence was removed from his post

The Agranat Report

• 9 This five-man Commission, which was chaired by the President of the Supreme Court, Dr. S. Agranat, and included two former Chiefs of Staff, was appointed by the Government to examine the responsi- bility of the military and civilian authorities for the failure to anticipate the Yom Kippur War and for the lapses in the initial conduct of the war
• The responsibility for these mistakes is attributed by the Commission primarily to the Director of Military Intelligence and his principal assistant who heads the research department, the only body in the country which deals with intelligence evaluation.
• But the Report shows that to some extent they succumbed to the all too human tendency of distinguishing much more clearly between signals and noise with hindsight than would have been possible at the time; they dwell on the signals which after the event are clearly seen to have heralded the attack, paying insufficient regard to the plethora of conflicting signs which pointed in the wrong direction. In addition to the obstacles to clear perception which the intelligence officers created themselves and which are so skilfully analyzed in the Report, there were all kinds of noises which either occurred by chance or were deliberately created by the enemy and which, in the perspective of the time, were no less relevant.
• Arab deception strategy was a further and significant reason behind the Israeli intelligence failure. Unlike the Wohlstetter model, which sees strategic surprise primarily as the result of ambiguous information, the model developed by Barton Whaley singles out deception as the key to surprise. His study of the German invasion of Russia in 1941 contends that Stalin had been surprised by Hitler's action not because the warnings were ambiguous, but precisely because the Germans had managed to reduce their ambiguity.
• The Arabs went far beyond mere secrecy and resorted to active deception designed to create a misleading impression concerning their capabilities, plans, and intentions. Their efforts ranged from welcoming Dr. Kissinger's peace initiatives in September 1973 to planting news items in a Lebanese newspaper about the neglect and deterioration of the Soviet equipment in the Suez Canal zone, and from staging the kidnapping of Soviet Jews by Palestinian terrorists in Austria as a decoy plan to positioning Syrian tanks "hull down," dug in to resist retaliative assault rather than to attack

The Psychological Roots of Surprise

• man nature.'7 Since the facts do not speak for themselves but need to be interpreted, it is inevitable that the individual human propensities of an intelligence officer will enter into the process of evaluation. Images, beliefs, ideological bias, wishful thinking, natural optimism or pessimism, confidence or the lack of it, all play a part in determining which facts the observer will notice and which he will ignore, the weight he will attach to the selected facts, the pattern into which he will fit them, and the conclusions which he will draw from them. It is arguable, therefore, that the discipline of psychology is as relevant to the study of surprise as that of military histor

• The Agranat Report provides a convincing analysis of the barriers to clear perception which stem from too rigid an adherence to a theory.

• It needs to be pointed out, however, that theories held by intelligence services, particularly theories that command such an impressive con- sensus as "the conception," do not spring out of thin

• Knorr distinguishes between "technical surprise" and what, for lack of a less inelegant term, he calls "behavioral surprise." A "technical sur- prise" is one not incompatible with the prevalent set of expectations. It occurs because the opponent was successful in concealing a partic- ular capability or in keeping a particular course of action shrouded in secrecy. "Behavioral surprise" occurs when the opponent's behavior is incompatible with our set of expectations. There are three causes of "behavioral surprise.""

• First, the opponent may act irrationally.35 Highly irrational behavior is, of course, extremely difficult to predict since it may follow direc- tions that make no sense to the rational mind. Second, the regnant set of expectations may be unrealistic because intelligence bodies are incompetent or strongly under the influence of "national images" of the outside world that are based more on myth or wishfulness than on objective perception. Third, an opponent's pattern of behavior may change as a result of changes in leadership or various other important conditions; a set of expectations, though realistic in the past, may not register this change quickly and correctly. The set, in other words, may be out of date.

• The surprise caused by the Arab attack of October 6, I973, was a "behavioral surprise"; its origins can be traced to the third cause enu- merated by Knorr. "The conception

The Instituitional Roots of Surprise

• Bureaucratic organizations are not immune to the limitations and weaknesses that lead individuals to make faulty evaluations, or to the tendency to interpret incoming information in such a way as to con- firm established theories and to eschew any radical criticism and the jettisoning of cherished ideas. Indeed, institutional factors may increase the human and psychological propensity for error. A circular process may evolve: a newspaper or a diplomatic service adopts a policy, sends out men to report on facts pertinent to it, selects the reports and men that seem favorable to the policy, and then receives from these men further reports more favorable, and so
• Any attempt to deal with this danger must focus on the relationship between the policy makers and the intelligence professionals-a rela- tionship that is of the utmost importance in determining the efficiency with which the national intelligence machinery function
• y. The failure of the Israeli national intelligence esti- mates in October 1973 vividly illustrates the disastrous consequences that excessive domination by the political leadership can h
• The Yom Kippur failure illustrates not only the danger of sub- ordinating intelligence to a dominant and centralizing political author- ity, but also the danger of dependence by the political authorities on a single source of intelligence evaluat
• In contrast to David Ben-Gurion who, in his capacity as Defense Minister, always insisted on reporting personally to the Cabinet on military and intelligence matters, Moshe Dayan regularly invited high-ranking officers to brief the Cabinet, a practice that tended to blur the line of division between ministerial and military responsibili
• The monopolistic structure of the intelligence community was large- ly responsible for the narrow, dogmatic, and monolithic thinking that characterized the estimates presented to the policy makers. It precluded the wider vision, depth, and subtlety which the confrontation of in- dependent evaluations and opposing points of view can produce.

Safeguards

• The view that adherence to rigid conceptions or theories is an im- portant cause of misperception is underlined not only by the case study here examined but also by a number of other historical examples. The Stennis Report attributed the intelligence failure that preceded the Cuban missile crisis of i962 primarily to the "predisposition of the in- telligence community to the philosophical conviction that it would be incompatible with Soviet policy to introduce strategic missiles into Cuba.

• Similarly, the North Korean aggression in I950 took the Truman Administration by surprise because its estimates had been based on the theory that the Soviet Union would not engage in overt forms of aggression, involving the risk of a general war, for several years to come

• The first safeguard, therefore, is to make the assumptions about the adversary's behavior, and the theories and predictions which are based on them, as explicit as possible. The more explicit they are, the greater will be the likelihood that once they cannot be squared with fresh pieces of evidence, that fact will not go unnoticed, and that a revision of the assumptions will take place rather than an unconscious suppression or distortion of the eviden

• A second safeguard for intelligence analysts is to examine their at- titudes for consistent or supporting beliefs that are not logically linked. These may be examples of psycho-logic.53 An evaluation in which elements that are not logically connected support the same conclusion should arouse their suspicion. The chances are considerable in such a case that the reasons for a particular evaluation are related to psychol- ogy and not to the substance of the evidence.

• Third, those who have the primary responsibility for predicting the adversary's plans can only avoid surprise if they constantly revise and update their assumptions and expectations. They must take account of any appreciable change in the military balance of power or a barely perceived change by the enemy of his own capability, as well as po- litical changes in the region and outside which might lead to a shift in the policy of the target country. To this end the gathering of accurate information about political and military developments will not be sufficient. The significance of these developments must be appraised from the vantage point of the other sid

• A fourth safeguard consists of applying several hypotheses or theories to the data available so as to avoid becoming the slave of the dominant theory. To quote Wohlstetter again: "A willingness to play with mate- rial from different angles and in the context of unpopular as well as popular hypotheses is an essential ingredient of a good detective, wheth- er the end is the solution of a crime or an intelligence estimate. This sort of flexibility is probably not good for one's reputation as a sound estimator, since one index to sound judgment is agreement with the hypothesis on which current departmental policy is based. But intel- ligence is always confronted with this choice: whether to be popular or alert

• Joseph de Rivera has taken this idea a step further in his suggestion that the organization itself must institutionalize a procedure that forces officials to try to disprove their own beliefs by setting up a routine procedure for systematically searching out information that goes against their view of reality. A group should always be assigned to make the opposition case. This group should:

• i. Be composed of competent men who are identified with the office, de- partment or administration, and who have the trust and confidence of the leadership and access to it.

• 2. Be given a fair opportunity to periodically present their case.
• 3. Be given feedback so that they are assured that the leadership under- stands the case they present.

• 4. Be given the authority to ask the leadership to state the assumptions on which the policy is based.

Institutional Reform

• The first proposal calls for the appointment of a special intelligence adviser to the Prime Minister, backed by a small but highly able team that would permit the Prime Minister and the Cabinet to undertake an independent political-strategic intelligence evaluation by drawing on all the material gathered by the various agencies. At the same time, such an adviser must not isolate.the heads of the intelligence community from direct contact with the Prime Minist
• Second, the Commission urges the reinforcement of the research de- partment of the Foreign Ministry by organizing it as an independent body within the Ministry, and by allocating to it the appropriate staff from the point of view of quantity and quality. One of the principal tasks of the department would be the carrying out of independent po- litical-strategic evaluations especially on the basis of the special material at its
• Third, the Commission recommends the fixing of clear rules to govern the distribution and feedback of the raw intelligence material by the gathering agencies to the various research setups and to the Defense Minister and Prime Minister.
• A fourth recommendation calls for the substantive restructuring of Military Intelligence to ensure that the center of gravity of research and evaluation will be in the sphere of military, strategic, operational, and tactical intelligence; to give encouragement and adequate oppor- tunity for expression to the different and conflicting views held by members of the research department in the evaluations that are trans- mitted by Military Intelligence to other bodies; to secure the appoint- ment of suitable personnel, including civilians, to the research depart- ment, with optimal channels of promotion and rotation within and outside the department; and to maintain continuous surveillance of in- telligence estimates
• Finally, the Commission suggests that an evaluation unit should be set up inside the Central Institute of Intelligence and Security (Ham- mosad) to evaluate the information collected by the Institute.