Date: July 29, 2006 5:39:21 AM PDT
Subject: [SPY NEWS] Spy Lessons From Israel
dyn/content/article/2006/07/28/AR2006072801573.html
Spy Lessons From Israel
By Jim Hoagland
Sunday, July 30, 2006; Page B07
Israel has been forced to improvise furiously on the battlefield
after discovering how much it did not know about the fighters and the
strategic arsenal that Hezbollah had amassed in southern Lebanon.
Americans should watch closely what will happen in Israel once the
smoke of this battle clears.
What will happen will be a thorough and bureaucratically impartial
inquiry into the causes of this intelligence failure -- an inquiry of
the kind that the United States seems unable to produce even in the
wake of Sept. 11, 2001, or the calamitous failure of U.S. occupation
troops and spies to secure Iraq in the wake of the 2003 invasion.
The prediction about Israel is not based on insider information. It
is based on history and on culture. Searing investigations that fixed
responsibility at the top and brought dismissals and resignations of
politicians, generals and intelligence officials followed the
surprise attack on Israel by Egypt and Syria in 1973 and the debacle
of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.
Israelis take intelligence deadly seriously. For them, it is a tool
of survival. They cannot afford to be as forgiving, or as ambivalent,
as Americans tend to be about espionage, a trade that in its very
essence runs counter to American ideals of a fair and open society
based on the rule of law.
While Americans debate whether CIA renditions and National Security
Agency eavesdropping violate the law -- a vital and necessary
question to be asked in this country -- Israelis demand to know why
their spies have been ineffective and then relentlessly examine how
to fix the problems. The U.S. system of checks and balances has
created a misleading veneer of intelligence oversight by Congress and
by the occasional, politically balanced blue-ribbon commission. That
veneer serves to obscure rather than fix responsibility for
ineffectiveness.
The intelligence failures by the Israelis in Lebanon and by the
Americans in Iraq are separate but related. They stem from the
incomplete transformation of espionage establishments originally
shaped by the demands of large-unit conventional warfare. The loose-
jointed networks of terrorist groups and insurgents who hide and
fight and then hide again among civilian populations are much harder
to find and destroy than were Soviet or Egyptian bombers parked on
airstrips.
The appalling widespread collateral damage from Israeli air raids --
including the killing of four U.N. observers -- is one sign of the
faulty "battlefield" intelligence. So is the Israeli shock at one of
its warships being hit by an Iranian-supplied C802 radar-guided anti-
ship missile that the Israelis did not suspect Hezbollah had.
The surprising extent and depth of the fortifications and of the long-
range rocket force assembled by the Lebanese Shiite group just across
Israel's northern frontier have forced Israel to alter the scope and
thrust of its original attack scenario. "What we found showed that
the Lebanese government and army would never be able to handle this
problem by themselves, as we hoped," one Israeli official told me.
So Israel has committed ground troops, vowed to establish a one-mile-
deep security strip inside Lebanon and endorsed an international
military stabilization force to be created under a U.N. mandate. None
of this was in the original attack plan to retaliate against
Hezbollah's killing and kidnapping of Israeli troops inside Israel.
American intelligence has done no better at predicting the course or
strength of Iraq's insurgency and the sectarian warfare that the
insurgents have deliberately fanned between Iraq's Shiites and
Sunnis. Months of Bush administration happy talk about a government
of national unity based on Sunni inclusion led not to a reduction of
violence that was predicted but to a sharp spike in Iraqi deaths and
destruction instead.
The Vietnamese adopted a strategy to "talk and fight" to wear down
American resolve. Iraq's Sunni extremists seem to have decided
to "vote and fight." The distrustful Shiite majority is striking
back, even as both groups participate in the "unity" government and
the parliament. American forces, given only spotty information by the
CIA-run Iraqi intelligence service, remain largely clueless about
identifying and separating good guys and bad guys on the ground, as
Iraqi officials suggested in a meeting here last week with National
Intelligence Director John Negroponte.
Reforming intelligence operations to meet the new challenges of
the "long war" on terrorism is a vast and difficult task that
Negroponte has only recently begun. He and his congressional
overseers must be ready to be brutally honest about intelligence
failure and honestly brutal in correcting it. Israel's history, and
its future, speak to how that can be done.
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