Is army intelligence really at fault for not stopping the October 7 massacre?
On February 25, the floodgates opened. Ben Caspit of Maariv finally got a variety of IDF intelligence personnel to open up about their October 7 failures. These presumably include Y, head of Unit 8200 (Israel’s National Security Agency), or his supporters. Caspit significantly revealed that an internal Unit 8200 report has mostly cleared Y from special blame for missing the signs of Hamas’s invasion and placed the blame on a decade of problematic processes in Unit 8200 and IDF intelligence more broadly.
But what was most significant about Caspit’s article was that it has led to a much wider number of top former Unit 8200 officials being ready to step forward, including several who spoke to the Magazine.
On the one hand, their views are fresh and enlightening, requiring a radical rethink of the performance of the roles of the IDF Military Intelligence Directorate and Unit 8200; as well as how the IDF Southern Command should perform its defense roles.
On the other hand, the views of these top intelligence sources are humbling, with some acknowledgments that the failures that led to the catastrophe of October 7 may be incredibly difficult to fix, no matter how much time and energy are invested.
Can the IDF intelligence failures be fixed?
Just firing a few top people will certainly come nowhere near fixing the root problems.
Virtually all the former intelligence officials believed that top heads would roll both in the intelligence and political establishment as a prerequisite to progress but that it was nowhere near sufficient. A major IDF probe is slated to be published in June. This does not mean there is no hope. Most sources have significant hope for the future.
But their views are not as simple as saying: “If only Unit 8200 or IDF intelligence analysis had properly understood the invasion threat presented by the activating of dozens to hundreds of Israeli sim cards shooting in Hamas territory on the eve of the attack, October 7 would have been avoided.”
Rather, the top intelligence sources say that the problems are much more fundamental to our cyclical faults as human beings, to our unique faults in the modern social media cyber age, and to changes that could take years or longer to make, such as changing what kinds of people join IDF intelligence, what training they have, and who does what within the clandestine world.
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