The 9/11 terrorist attacks, which left more than 3,000 Americans dead, were a surprise primarily because of “failures of imagination,” the final report of the 9/11 Commission concluded.
In the summer of 2001, the terrorist danger posed by Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda “was not a major topic for policy debate among the public, the media, or in the Congress,” the commission found.
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But imagine if months before 9/11, a U.S. intelligence officer, whose job it was to monitor al Qaeda, produced a detailed report outlining the plot to hijack commercial airliners and fly them into buildings, complete with evidence the terrorists had been meticulously rehearsing how to pull it off.
Imagine if, after reading the report and reviewing the intelligence, higher-ups dismissed it as fanciful, something that would be impossible to carry out, and then failed to pass it along or take any actions to address the vulnerabilities it exposed.
Imagine the outrage and then imagine how Israelis must feel today about the revelation the horrific Oct. 7 attack by Hamas might have been prevented had key intelligence not been ignored.
In the case of 9/11, U.S. intelligence agencies failed to connect the dots. But in the case of Oct. 7, it turns out the dots had all been neatly connected months ago.
But when veteran Israeli intelligence analysts, whose primary job is to protect the citizens of Israel, were advised Hamas had an elaborate plan to breach Israel’s “impregnable” border defenses, they scoffed.
It was an epic blunder that will haunt Israel’s future for years if not decades.
Here’s how it happened:
In the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attack, Israel’s intelligence agencies were quick to admit they had failed to detect any indications of an imminent threat.
The highly sophisticated and coordinated operation, involving a diversionary rocket attack and terrorists breaching Israel’s high-tech border fence with Gaza by paragliding over it and bulldozing through it, was a complete surprise, they insisted.
That struck New York Times reporter Ronen Bergman, who has been covering the Israeli military and its intelligence services for decades, as odd.
“I thought either it’s courageous — people with cojones who say, we failed,” or maybe he thought, “Some people are very fast to admit something that is very embarrassing in order to hide, to cover up a much darker truth.”
As he recounted on the Daily, a New York Times podcast, Bergman’s sources told him, “The real story is not about what they didn’t know. … It’s about what they knew.”
That led him to a source who provided an encrypted email stream from a veteran professional analyst at a base in southern Israel in charge of intelligence collection from Gaza.
“I start hearing stories that there’s a woman who alerted, who got it right. And then I got access to the email thread,” Bergman said.
“In July 6 of this year, she writes the first email in that thread where she is describing a military drill that Hamas was running in the center of Gaza City with two platoons.”
The mock invasion she describes included practice in downing Israeli aircraft, raiding a kibbutz, and attacking a military academy, killing all the cadets, all overseen by Hamas commanders.
In her report, she notes that one commander invokes a quote from the Quran, “Surprise them through the gate. If you do, you will certainly prevail.”
It was the same quote that was on the first page of a 40-page Hamas invasion plan code-named “Jericho Wall,” obtained by Israeli intelligence last year, which outlined how methodical assault could overwhelm Israeli fortifications around the Gaza Strip.
“Hamas followed the blueprint with shocking precision,” the New York Times reported after reviewing a translation of the plan. “The document called for a barrage of rockets at the outset of the attack, drones to knock out the security cameras and automated machine guns along the border, and gunmen to pour into Israel en masse in paragliders, on motorcycles and on foot — all of which happened on Oct. 7.”
“The purpose of ‘Jericho Wall’ is to take down the Gaza Division. Gaza Division is the division that is protecting the Israeli-Gazan border. They control a massive fence, which is erected above ground and underground to stop the tunnels,” Bergman said in the podcast interview, adding that when he got a chance to read the document in Hebrew, he was shocked at the level of detailed intelligence Hamas had on Israeli forces and their limited staffing at the border with Gaza.
“I see all the details, the secret details of how this works — how many people, where they sit, where is the headquarters, where are the regional brigades, where are the towers with the machine guns, where are the scouts watching them and operating them,” Bergman said.
The unnamed analyst includes all of this in a long, “very detailed, meticulous” memo to her superiors.
“So at first, everybody [is] complimenting her for the detailed job that she’s doing,” Bergman said, but then the intelligence chief of the Gaza Division, while calling the report “intelligence gold,” dismisses the attack scenario as “imaginative.”
“‘We need to differentiate between what they do for show-off and what they’re really able to do,’ he says. ‘They can do this … when there is no enemy … no Israelis, when they’re not actually firing. But this is for show-off,’” Bergman said, citing the email threads he read.
“But she is not shy. And she is reacting,” Bergman recounts. “She says, ‘This is not imaginative. This is not something that they are hoping to do. This is something they want to do and are capable of doing.’”
She tells her boss that she believes Hamas is planning a full-scale “invasion,” not a small-scale raid. “This is a preparation for war, and it can happen,” she says.
“His view carries the day because this was the common wisdom. She was going against the stream,” Bergman said.
In his investigation, Bergman finds that many senior-level Israeli officials were unaware of the ominous warning from the lone intelligence officer, and the White House said the document was never shared with the U.S. intelligence community.
Bergman says Israel became complacent, failing to man the border adequately, based on two mistaken beliefs: that the border fence with its cameras and detection systems could not be breached by Hamas and that Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, was not interested in war with Israel.
“The forces on the border were not sharp, were not ready, because they said that the fence is invincible,” Bergman said. “You see the videos from the day of the invasion. You see how easy it was for Hamas to break the fence. And you don’t understand the gap between invincible and just one bulldozer just take it out.”
In an interview on CNN, former U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen blamed the massive intelligence failure on a combination of arrogance and ignorance.
“Arrogance in the sense that they had very little regard for Hamas, thinking that it was all aspirational, they didn’t have any particular talent or capability,” Cohen said. “It was sort of ‘we can handle it under any circumstances, they’re not really a threat.’ The ignorance comes about in terms of, they didn’t have sufficient evidence for them,” Cohen said, with the exception of the one woman analyst who did.
“And yet she was disregarded,” Cohen said, adding, “As Golda Meir said, a woman has to prove herself much more capable than a man in order to be called successful.”
“I think what you saw was just a general dismissal by Israel and Israel’s intelligence community of the possibility of this level of a threat, which really goes to the complete breakdown that occurred here,” Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said on CBS. “It’s been amazing to have our intelligence community now working closely with the Israeli intelligence community and see the gaps that they have.”
Part of the problem, Turner admitted, could have been “an institutional bias” that resulted in the dismissal of an outlier analysis that contradicted conventional wisdom.
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has promised a full investigation of the blunder but says it will have to wait until after the campaign to wipe out Hamas is over.
“My top mission is to save the country and to bring us to complete victory over Hamas,” Netanyahu said at an Oct. 28 news conference. “After the war, all of us will have to give answers to tough questions, including me. There was a terrible failure. It’s going to be investigated. We’re going to turn each stone in order.”
