Oct. 7: Intelligence Failure or Something Else?

Rockets are fired toward Israel from Gaza, on Oct. 7, 2023. AP Photo/Fatima Shbair

Commentary

Following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, there has been intense debate on what seems like a colossal intelligence failure on both Israel’s and the United States’ part. Many have questioned how it’s possible that two of the premier intelligence superpowers in the world failed to get advance knowledge of the attack.

Ample Warning

Ric Grenell, former acting director of national intelligence under then-President Donald Trump, said on a Nov. 10, 2023, podcast with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) that he estimates that the hands-on intelligence gathering people probably did know and had raised red flags but that higher-ups may have played down the warnings because of political or conceptual biases or considerations. He said he had encountered this phenomenon all the time in the U.S. intelligence community.

On Nov. 27, 2023, Israeli Channel 12 News reported that it had obtained internal emails from Unit 8200 (the Israeli military signals intelligence unit, similar to the National Security Agency) where allegedly already on July 6, 2023, an experienced non-commissioned officer (NCO) specializing in Hamas had exposed Hamas’s operational plan, in chilling detail, and its intensive training for implementing it.

The title of her email, according to the report, was “Death in the Kibbutz.” The text of the email stated that “at the end of May [2023] there was a crazy training exercise, of two Nukhba squadrons [Hamas’s special forces], witnessed by an array of Hamas senior officials,” and that the exercise included forces riding jeeps and motorcycles. The terrorists also practiced shooting down a jet and a helicopter (which Hamas actually attempted), and most of the exercise was taking over an imaginary kibbutz and a military training base. A later email from the NCO included part of a conversation between two Hamas terrorists, in which one says they’re ready and waiting for the order to execute the plan.

According to the report, many other people on the email thread thought it was “gold,” but a senior officer “cooled it down” and commented in the email thread that “the scenario described ... is completely imaginary.” The head of military intelligence reportedly didn’t receive the warning. An IDF spokesperson said that after the war, there will be a full and honest investigation. It’s unclear whether this information reached political leadership before Oct. 7, 2023.

There have also been multiple reports that for months before the attack, soldiers manning the security camera feeds from the billion-dollar highly advanced border fence around Gaza had been warning that there was an unusual level of activity and training exercises. People who used to be in the areas near the fence, such as farmers, had been gradually disappearing and had been replaced by others. The reports claimed that senior commanders had repeatedly ignored the warnings and even threatened some of these soldiers with court martials if they continued to raise the alarm. A day before the attack, these soldiers reported people holding maps and pointing at the security fence.

Of course, intelligence, military, and political leaders come across many troubling signs daily, and it’s part of their responsibility to make out the “signal from the noise” and decide what reports and intelligence estimates warrant changes in policy and the ramping up of defenses. It’s easy to see with 20/20 hindsight and enormously hard in real time. A hundred successes kept from the public pale in comparison to one failure that’s impossible to hide. It’s the nature of the job. However, it’s equally easy to use the above as a blanket amnesty from responsibility.

Actually, the overall operational concept has been known to Israeli military and political leadership for years, not least because it has been attempted before multiple times by Hamas, Hezbollah, and others, to greater and lesser degrees of success, though never to such an extent. During one of those times, in 2006, a single soldier was captured, Gilad Shalit, and in a deal with Hamas for his release, more than 1,000 terrorists were released, including current Hamas Gaza leader and alleged mastermind of the attack Yahya Sinwar.

Former defense minister Avigdor Lieberman, now in opposition, prepared and submitted in December 2016 a comprehensive document detailing this operational concept and calling for a preemptive strike against Hamas. The call was rejected, and this eventually led to his resignation. The document also described the high-tech border fence as “an important ingredient in the current defense strategy of Israel vs. Gaza, but it cannot be a strategy in and of itself”—a warning that has tragically proven true.

There’s a story President Trump told about defeating ISIS. During the Obama years and his first months in office, not enough progress had been made. Then he made a trip to the Middle East and met with the generals who were hands-on, on the ground, and they told him that ISIS could be defeated if some things were changed in policy and strategy. Once back in the Oval Office, he made those changes, and ISIS was defeated. In October 2017, The Epoch Times reported that then-Defense Secretary Gen. Jim Mattis said that the United States had switched to “annihilation tactics” against ISIS, and that the intent was that “the foreign fighters do not survive the fight to return” to their home countries.

Although one can’t fully verify the above story, the point still holds. Many times, the people on the ground, with expert knowledge, should be reached out to by top decision-makers. Though these people usually don’t have the overview and can’t see all the considerations, they can provide firsthand knowledge and information that may be lost in the normal “escalation” process of decision-making, intentionally or not. Also, it’s useful to have as “flat” an organization as possible, so that the distance from the top to the field is the shortest. So far, it seems like Mr. Grenell was right in his estimate.

Aspirational Strategy

It seems Israeli leadership was pursuing a deliberate strategy over the past decade or more of allowing Hamas to survive, despite repeated attacks on Israel and repeated counter-offensives by Israel. It didn’t only allow Hamas to survive, but also allowed it to accumulate wealth and power. This was a thought-through strategy aimed at achieving concrete goals.

Former Cabinet minister Haim Ramon wrote in an op-ed on May 19, 2023, that since 2009, Israeli leadership, under three prime ministers (Netanyahu, Bennett, and Lapid) and five defense ministers, had had the same strategy toward Gaza—an unwritten alliance with Hamas. He writes that this was to serve one purpose: to maintain the split between Palestinians in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria), controlled by the Palestinian Authority, and Gaza, thus preventing a viable two-state solution in the land of Israel (Israel and Palestine), a path preferred by many Western governments.

Current Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said in a television interview in 2015 that “the Palestinian Authority is a burden, and Hamas is an asset.”

A source had quoted Mr. Netanyahu himself, in a Jerusalem Post article from March 12, 2019, at an internal Likud party (the party he leads) meeting, defending Israel’s regular allowance of Qatari funds to be transferred into Gaza, reportedly saying that it was “part of a broader strategy to keep Hamas and the Palestinian Authority separate.” The prime minister also allegedly said at that meeting “that ‘whoever is against a Palestinian state should be for’ transferring the funds to Gaza, because maintaining a separation between the PA in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza helps prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.”

It has also been reported that over the past several years, the Israeli leadership has been presented, by three consecutive heads of the General Security Service (Israel’s “MI5”), with multiple operations for approval to take out Hamas leaders, including Mr. Sinwar. These concrete operational plans have never been approved.

On Dec. 16, 2023, The New York Times reported that Israel’s Mossad (Israel’s CIA) unit “Harpoon,” which went after the finances of terror organizations, à la “the Untouchables,” detected in 2018 a vast array of assets indirectly owned by Hamas worth at least hundreds of millions of dollars. The report said that this was presented to Israeli and U.S. leadership but not pursued until too late.

It was believed that as long as Hamas kept getting money, and maintained control over Gaza, it wouldn’t jeopardize its power with a disproportionate attack, while at the same time, it would serve as a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority and make sure Israel wasn’t pressured by the international community to proceed with a “two-state solution.”

Whether a two-state solution between “the river (Jordan) and the sea (Mediterranean)” is viable now, or has ever been, deserves a separate article, or 10. But, regardless, to prevent it, the above strategy was devised and pursued by consecutive Israeli governments.

It seems that the above strategy, and the assumptions that underlie it, have acted as a filter or distortion over the eyes of military and political leadership for many years, making it very hard for them to notice the pattern of a coming attack and to see it for what it is.

Dancing With the Devil

All through the generations, strategists and leaders have applauded the cunning and effectiveness of the “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” approach. And in truth, it has proven effective time and time again on a tactical, time-limited level, to avert disaster, or to gain momentary advantage.

However, numerous times throughout history, when this approach has been employed as a longer-term strategy, it has failed. An obvious case, discussed a lot in The Epoch Times and even by me, is the U.S. policy of empowering the CCP to counter the USSR—a policy that has put all of us, our freedoms, and societies in real danger. Another example is the United States’ propping up Islamist extremists in USSR-controlled Afghanistan in the 1980s, only to have this come back to badly hurt the United States in 9/11, and in all the wars that have followed.

The crux of the matter, as I see it, lies in the moral dimension. When a potential partner regime is corrupt and evil, no long-term alliance with it will hold. It will always stab one in the back. So although a short-term convergence of interests may work, anything more is doomed to fail. Foreign policy is obviously not conducted only among friends. But acute awareness of the moral dimension of other regimes and governments can enable national leaders to make realistic choices that would serve their people well.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.