Former Israeli Intelligence Chief Reflects on Past Failures and Operations

Chapter Thirteen It was a huge responsibility, and not just because I was suddenly in charge of an intelligence apparatus ranging from Unit 8200, our sophisticated signals collection and decryption unit, to the operational units like Sayeret Matkal. It was what was at stake if things went wrong: success or failure in war, and the life or death of thousands of men on the battlefield. It was a price we’d paid painfully in 1973. And now again, just nine years later, in Lebanon. If I needed any reminder, it was conveniently placed on my new office wall: the photographs of each of my nine predecessors since 1948 as Head of the Intelligence Directorate, or Rosh Aman in Hebrew. All had come to the role with talent and dedication. All but three had either left under a shadow, or been fired. Sometimes this was because of ultimately non-fatal lapses, like a botched mobilization of our reserves in 1959, or the Rotem crisis a few months later. Sometimes, it was due to lethal failures like the Yom Kippur War and Lebanon. I went to see all eight former directors who were still alive. “You know, I used to read the newspapers and listen to the BBC in the car to work,” Shlomo Gazit told me. He was the director ’'d worked for in operational intelligence, the one who’d so memorably made the point that we might endanger Israeli security not only be missing the signs of a war, but signs of an opportunity for peace. He was also one of the few to have left office without blemish. “By the time I got to the Airya, I already knew 80 percent of what I could about what was going on,” he said. “Then I’d spend six or seven hours reading intelligence material, to fill in at least part of the remaining 20 percent.” His message, echoed by my other predecessors, was that the job wasn’t mainly about the raw information. It was what you concluded from the information, what you did with it. It was about judgement. The intelligence did matter, of course. For all of Israel’s strengths in that area, I knew from my own experience at Sultan Yacoub that there was still room to get more, better, and more timely information about our enemies, and make sure it got to the commanders and field units that needed it. And while the details of many operations I approved for Sayeret Matkal and other units remain classified, we did succeed in doing that — to take just one example, by finding an entirely new way to get intelligence from inside Syrian command posts. Yet above all, I set out to apply the lessons of the 1973 and 1982 wars. In rereading the official inquiry reports, I saw that the intelligence failings had 211 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028059