Israel/Hamas War Commentary: Intelligence Failure

By Rich Kozlovich

 

The one overriding view that permeates every intelligence agency in the world is this.  If someone has a secret, it must be important, and we want to know what it is. Make no mistake, someone knew this was coming.  Anything this big, with so many people involved, and being in the planning stages for a year leaves trails all over the place.  Someone knew!  And now there's evidence American intelligence knew an attack was eminent out of Gaza.  Who did they tell?  I will be updating this as more information becomes available.

 

A couple of possibilities to explain Israel’s (and America’s) intelligence failures - October 8, 2023 By Andrea Widburg - For a sneak attack of the size Hamas launched against Israel to have happened (5,000 rockets, parachuters, towns infiltrated, Iranian and, possibly, Ukrainian involvement), there must have been an absolutely epic intelligence failure both in Israel and, to the extent the U.S. helps Israel with information, here in America, too. I have two ideas about how that could have happened, both of which are premised on significant problems within the two country’s intelligence services (especially Israel’s). I’ll start with the one that bespeaks actual evil and then get to the more likely one, which reflects human nature..........\

 

Intelligence Failure - There appears to have been a considerable intelligence failure in the runup to the invasion some are calling “Israel’s 9/11.” While the Israelis sort it out, Americans might look back at the actual 9/11, which the vaunted Central Intelligence Agency failed to detect or prevent....... With millions of “migrants” crossing our border, does anyone think our intelligence community has a clue about potential threats that may be gathering?

 

Egypt Warned Israelis on October 4 That ‘Something Big’ Was About to Happen in Gaza - Hugh Fitzgerald October 18, 2023 -Some troubling questions.  The chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Michael McCaul, has publicly asserted that from several different sources it is now clear that Egypt warned Israel in advance that “something big” was about to happen in Gaza, and that that warning was ignored by Israel.  More on this can be found here: “Egypt warned Israel three days before Hamas massacre – US congressman,” Jerusalem Post, October 11, 2023:

US House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Michael McCaul told reporters on Wednesday that Egypt had warned Israel three days before Hamas’s assault on southern Israel that “an event like this could happen,” according to US media.

“There seems to have been a failure of intelligence. We’re not quite sure how we missed it. We’re not quite sure how Israel missed it,” said McCaul after a classified briefing about the war.

“We know that Egypt had warned the Israelis three days prior that an event like this could happen. We know this event was planned perhaps as long as a year ago,” added the House Foreign Affair chair….

The Prime Minister’s Office has denied the reports, calling them “absolutely false” and stressing that “No message in advance has arrived from Egypt and the prime minister has neither spoken, nor met, with the head of Egyptian intelligence since the formation of the government, neither directly nor indirectly.”

It is entirely possible that such a warning never made it to the Prime Minister. Once the current war against Hamas is over, the government should investigate how high that warning did manage to go, and why it did not proceed all the way up the chain of command in time...............

Is Israel expendable? - October 19, 2023 By G. Murphy Donovan - James Jesus Angleton, former head of CIA counterintelligence, once said that the intelligence business is a “wilderness of mirrors.” Surely he was speaking about intelligence and policy at the merge, a junction now obscured by secrecy, bigotry, war, and abject incompetence. Policy is ill served by intelligence bias and partisanship. The country, in turn is ill served by policy that gets lost in the tactical weeds at the expense of coherent strategy. The American approach to terror and Islamism is a hodgepodge of contradictions, naive and piecemeal at best. American Intelligence knows the name and nationality of every Islamist terror group and also knows the names and nationalities of every state supporter of Islamism. Still, two decades hence after 9/11, America still does not have a coherent policy or a plan to take out the Islamist threat.