Still Hazy After All These Years
By Amir Oren
48 years have passed since that London night in which Mossad Chief Major General Zvi Zamir met his prize agent, Ashraf Marwan, a member of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s inner circle and son-in-law of Sadat’s predecessor, Gammal Abd-el Nasser. 48 years, quite a long period, equivalent to the time elapsed between the turn of the 20th Century and the establishment of the State of Israel, yet the issue of intelligence failure in the run-up to the Yom Kippur War is still alive whenever Israelis of the 1973 generation bemoan the devestating price paid for complacency.
there are two basic schools of thought in this debate. One, following the report of a Commission of Inquiry whose members strove to stabilise the tittering political leadership of Prime Minister Golda Meir, put most of the blame on the lack of early warning. The other school looked up to the highest echelon, holding Meir and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan primarily accountable, while giving the Israel Defense Forces high command and the intelligence community their relative parts in the debacle.
In either school, there are arguments regarding Mossad versus Aman, the Directorate of Military Intelligence in charge of national assessment. At the time, Mossad focused on espionage, special operations and foteign liaison, having no expertise in evaluating the validity and significance of its own raw products. If Marwan’s reports did not get the attention they deserved, it was Aman’s fault, claim Mossad’s advocates. The Aman counter-argument is that even if Marwan was not a double agent in the classical sense of a duping operation, he was too good a source to be true, with the few senior Israelis privy to his identity – a dozen or so Ministers, Generals and analysts – addicted to his reports to the extent of dependence on them, with their lack considered proof positive that there is not yet cause for alarm.
Almost all high-level participants in the 1973 crisis are gone, save for 98-year-old Henry Kissinger and the two rivals at the top of Israeli Intelligence, Zamir and Aman’s Major General Eli Zeira. With the death last week of their colleague Herzl Shafir, in charge of manpower and generating new units to stem the tide during the war, Zeira and Zamir are the only survivors of the inner circle running Israel defense in the Yom Kippur era. With their rivalry and longevity, the two Z’s bring to mind Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, who held on until July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary if the nation they took part in establishing, inquiring about each other. Historical figures regardless of the fact that they are still around, the questions raised by and lobbed at Zeira and Zamir will surely outlive them.
One of those has to do with the difficulty of deciphering messages, even when they come directly from the horse’s – or camel’s – mouth and with no deception intended. Marwan told Zamir that though Sadat had started the ball rolling, he may just as well decide to stop it, provided certain conditions are met, such as an abrupt diplomatic concession by Meir, or public exposure of the war’s imminence. In such a case, said Marwan, mimicking Sadat, the Cairo conductor could capriciously wave down his baton and the orchestra would cease and desist.
This opaque situation, in which a single person could change the fate of nations, regions and indeed the world based on a process taking place inside his impenetrable mind, caused Dayan to hesitate in considering Israel’s response to Zamir’s report, coming as it is on top of earlier indications, but with Jerusalem reluctant to make warlike moves (deployment, mobilisation) which could either bring about the conflagration it wanted to avoid and with the added burden of being blamed for it, or generate pressure on Israel – on its Knesset elections’ eve, no less – to start its withdrawal from the Sinai, which was the political aim of the war, anyway. Sadat would have achieved his aim without firing a shot.
Dayan therefore objected to the General Staff request to call up four reserve Army Divisions, two for containing the Egyptian and Syrian onslaughts across the Suez Canal and the Golan Heights boundary and two for counter-attacks into Egypt and Syria. The Defense Minister wanted as little as necessary, not as much as possible with Cairo and Damascus on the horizon as offensive objectives. War seemed to be the least of his troubles. Surely, the IDF will easily dispose of the attackers. He was more concerned with the home front – how to justify a panicky call-up on the Jewish calendar’s holiest day, and for nothing, indeed making the case that Israel was not secure behind her territorial acquisitions. He therefore ordered two official announcements to be drafted, one reporting that Israel was attacked, the other explaining the call-up and promising that the reserves will be released once the emergency is over.
Naftali Bennett, born 1972, has no personal memory of these events. He surely read about them, though there is no indication that he immersed himself in their lessons. Bennett ascended first to Dayan’s old seat at the Defense Ministry, then to Meir’s in the Prime Minister’s office. He is now in charge of keeping Israel safe, stable and secure. Hopefully, on his watch Israel will not have to re-learn painful lessons such of the magnitude of the Yom Kippur War’s
Earlier this week, under relentless political pressure, Bennett chose a Knesset speech to disclose a failed Mossad operation to solve a decades-old mystery – whatever happened to Captain Ron Arad, an Air Force navigator who ejected from his disabled F-4 while on a bombing mission in Lebanon. Arad was held by various Iranian-backed Shiite militias, communicated through his captors for a while, then disappeared. All efforts to ascertain his fate, be it through bravery or bribery, came to naught. Whoever knows anything isn’t talking, and those who presumed to know turned out to be dishonestly seeking personal gain.
35 years on, Bennett saw fit to revive the Arad story, with the narrative being that Israel will never give up on its efforts to locate the remains of her missing in action and presumed dead. It is the opposite of that hallowed feature of military cemetaries, the tomb of the unknown soldier. In Arad’s case, as in that of executed spy Lt.-Col. Eli Cohen in Syria, the soldier is well known, but his grave is not.
For Bennett, the message may be that Israel is honor and duty bound to go out of its way in order to bring home the remains of its fallen fighters, or at least definitive data on their resting places. But for intelligence analysts and decision makers alike, there is another, more professional, lesson. No matter how sophisticated and proficient the Israelis have become at knowing most everything there is to know about hostile reactors, tunnels, missiles, facilities and movements of men and materiel, no device has been invented to pry into the human mind and know – not guess, assume or surmise, but know for a fact – the secrets there in.
If a Khaneini or Nasrallah wants to keep a secret, and no visible action derives from it, they can. If a Hamas leader insists on holding the whereabouts of an abducted Gilad Shalit within an extremely small circle of confidantes, to the extent that Israel will have less then the 99% certainty it needs to conduct a rescue operation with reasonable chances of success (no harm to Shalit, little or none to his rescuers), then his counter-intelligence team has won over Israel’s Aman, Shabak and Mossad combined.
In 1973, massive armed forces confronted each other, but the will to make use of the capabilities came down to one person – Sadat in Cairo, Meir in Tel Aviv, where she stayed for Yom Kippur and considered whether to authorise a pre-emptive strike. Today, the concern for an individual serviceman long gone may reflect a sort of a “Saving Private Ryan” sensibility in the midst of a general war, with thousands of casualties, but the fact seems to have not changed since time immemorial. Vaults can be broken into, computer networks hacked, yet the brain – if its owner is not caught and interrogated –