There’s nobody like the British. The things they get excited about!
A terrible thing has happened. Their Prime Minister lied to them! The whole country is in anuproar.
And – how awful! – the intelligence services have trimmed their findings to suit theirpolitical boss. Astounding!
In Israel, the United States and most other places around the world, this would hardly rate aparagraph on an inside page. The Prime Minister lied? So what else is new?
On the contrary, if the Prime Minister had been caught telling the truth, now that would havebeen a sensation. What, he spoke the truth? The Prime Minister? What’s going on? What is he upto?
And the intelligence services? In children’s tales, spies risk their lives to uncoversecrets and save their country.
How wonderful! And what a pity that it has so little to do with reality.
The intelligence services do indeed look for facts, but mostly for the facts that suit theirpolitical bosses. They submit reports to governments, but woe betide the service chief whosereport does not suit their agenda. In short, there is hardly an intelligence report that is nottrimmed to suit the powers that be, that does not twist the facts or is not an outright lie.
That explains the successive failures of the intelligence agencies in almost all countriesand in almost all emergencies.
A few notorious examples should suffice:
A German communist named Victor Sorge, who was spying in Japan, provided Soviet intelligencein 1941 with a detailed report on the imminent German attack on the Soviet Union, with the exacttime to the minute. Stalin refused to accept this report and threatened to send to Siberia anyintelligence officer reporting such nonsense. As a result, hundreds of thousands of Red Armysoldiers were killed or captured when the German attack (“Operation Barbarossa’)materialized exactly on time. This was so incredible, that a modern Russian historian hasinvented an original explanation: Stalin was just about to attack Hitler when he wasforestalled at the last moment.
Or the case of the attack on Pearl Harbor, December 1941. American intelligence had manyindications that the Japanese were intending to destroy the US Pacific Fleet. But when theattack actually came, the American navy was totally unprepared. That was so strange, thatanother conspiracy theory gained credibility: President Roosevelt practically invitedthe Japanese attack, so as to be able to drag his unwilling country into the war.
Before the September 11 attack on the Twin Towers, there were several warnings, but all of themgot stuck in the intelligence pipelines. This has lent credibility to another conspiracytheory: that it was all organized by the Mossad, who had even warned the Jews working in theTowers no to report to work on that particular day.
The failures of Israeli intelligence make an impressive list. On the eve of the establishmentof the state, the intelligence services (or their forerunners) did not foresee the attack ofthe Arab armies that almost destroyed the new state in its infancy. In May 1967, theintelligence services were flabbergasted when Gamal Abd-al-Nasser sent an army into Sinai(and started the chain of events that led to the June 1967 war). The Egyptian revolution of 1952caught Israeli intelligence unawares, as did the Iraqi revolution of 1958, as did theKhomeini revolution in Iran, in spite of the fact that the Israeli intelligence servicespractically had the run of the country in the Shah’s Iran.
The most notorious example was, of course, the eve of the October 1973 war. Israeli armyintelligence knew everything: the Egyptian war plan and the assembly positions of allEgyptian units. It saw them taking up these positions. It overheard dozens of messages thatshould have left no doubt whatsoever that the attack was imminent. A day before the war, ahighly placed Egyptian who was spying for Israel confirmed the reports about the comingattack. And yet, the Israeli army was taken by surprise when the Egyptians crossed the SuezCanal without effective opposition.
The official investigation into this intelligence failure gave birth to the Hebrewexpression “conceptsia” – meaning that army intelligence ignored all the obvious factsbecause it was trapped in its own “concept” that the Egyptians were quite unable to attack.
This is a natural phenomenon. According to “Gestalt” psychology, a person tends to absorbinformation in line with the existing pattern in his mind and tends to ignore information thatcontradicts it.
Like other people, intelligence operatives have preconceived ideas and prejudices. Bits ofinformation that do not fit in just do not pass through the pipelines. They are denied anddisappear.
But there is another, much simpler explanation. Every intelligence chief has a politicalboss – a President, Prime Minister, Secretary of Defense, Home Secretary. His career dependson the boss, and so do the chances of advancement of his underlings. When the boss appoints theservice chiefs, he chooses people who are close to his political agenda. In time, the wholeintelligence service becomes an apparatus for supplying the boss with the information hewants to hear and suppressing less agreeable information. That is true not only indictatorships like those of Stalin, Hitler and Saddam, but also in most democratic regimes.The successful intelligence chief is an acrobat who walks between the raindrops and knows howto adapt the intelligence data to the interests of the political leadership.
For example: during most of the years between the Six-day and the Yom-Kippur wars, Israel wasruled by Golda Meir, a tough and not-very-wise person. She never dreamt of returning theterritories that had just been conquered. Her Minister of Defense, Moshe Dayan, the idol ofthe masses at the time, declared that Sharm-al-Sheikh (in South Sinai) was more importantthan peace. In order to sell these goods to the Israeli public, it was necessary to present theArab armies as a negligible force, bands of nincompoops who would throw away their boots andrun the moment they saw an Israeli mess sergeant. Army intelligence officially decided thatan Egyptian attack had only “low probability”. Two thousand Israeli soldiers – and who knowshow many Egyptians and Syrians – paid for this with their lives.
From Golda to George, quite a short jump. Bush wanted a war in Iraq. He could not disclose thereal aim to the public: to get his hands on the fabulous oil riches of that country, to dominatethe world’s oil supplies and acquire a stranglehold on the economies of Europe, Japan and anyother potential competitor. He needed a much more simple and compelling reason: Saddam hasweapons of mass destruction, he is in cahoots with Bin-Laden, he is about to attack the UnitedStates.
To be convincing, authoritative-sounding intelligence data were required. So the CIAproduced documents, already known to be false, showing Saddam trying to acquire uranium inNiger. Put this into the President’s State of the Union Address and hop! there’s your war.
Did the Americans get upset when the lie was discovered? Not at all. So the President lied. Bigdeal. And the CIA helped him to lie. Big deal again. The important thing is that the sons ofSaddam have been killed in a “targeted elimination”, Israeli-style. How wonderful!
But in the UK, things work differently. There you have a political class and clear standards ofwhat’s “done” and what’s “not done”. The intelligence service tailored its reports to therequirements of Tony Blair. He did not have to ask. As always, the intelligence people knewwhat he needed and supplied the stories that could be “sexed up” to taste. One of the expertsinformed the BBC, and sometimes later his body was found. Maybe he really committed suicide.Maybe.
England is in an uproar, and perhaps Blair and his henchmen will suffer for it. In Israel, thankGod, there is no such problem. Our intelligence chiefs blabber, blabber and blabb, and theirprattle always suits the needs of the Prime Minister. When Prime Ministers change, theprattle of the intelligence chiefs changes accordingly.
Their masters’ voice.