Strategic Assessment

Keywords: diplomacy; intelligence; Ministry of Foreign Affairs; decision-making; information revolution

Background

Intelligence
is part of the diplomatic effort that aims to promote the strategic goals of
the state through both contacts behind closed doors and public contacts. This
definition contains a structural impediment stemming from the definition of the
national interest. The various arms of the security establishment, intelligence
included, view the existential needs of the state and the struggle against
military threats as the supreme national interest and the top priority
dominating all other state interests. In contrast, and in addition to the overall
aims of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the
foreign service highlights the need to build foreign relations based on
Israel’s image as a legitimate member of the family of nations, and to
consolidate its power as the nation state of the Jewish people that, like other
nations, is committed to international law and justice.

The aims of intelligence are typically perceived as gathering information and engaging in analysis for the consumers of intelligence, and covert work outside the borders of the state to promote strategic goals and thwart subversive internal threats. In times of peacemaking, intelligence must have the ability to know and assess everything that can help decision makers identify factors that promote peace and identify factors that endanger peace (Hareven, 1998).

In 1949, early in Israel’s existence, the Military Intelligence Department (which subsequently became the Intelligence Directorate of the IDF) viewed itself as a body aimed at providing intelligence only on military matters, whereas the required surrounding strategic intelligence was provided by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. At the same time, the Military Intelligence Department began to expand its activity to include strategic political issues. This occurred in part due to its mastery of signals intelligence (SIGINT), which gave it a great advantage over the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in gathering intelligence and formulating intelligence assessments in this realm.

At the same
time, the Department had a prominent interest in bolstering its own status and
prestige by establishing closer direct relations with the state leadership.
With its consolidation during the 1950s, and its transformation into an
independent directorate of the General Staff in 1953 (the Intelligence
Directorate), it assumed senior standing vis-à-vis the other bodies in Israel’s
intelligence community. Its direct connection with state leaders was
established, and it became the state’s major assessment body and a body with
major influence over decision making, not only in the military realm but in the
strategic realm as well.

The Intelligence Research Center in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was established after the Yom Kippur War following the report by the Agranat Commission (1974), which recommended that Israel strive toward intelligence research pluralism and strengthen the political research department by organizing it as an independent body within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The decision to establish the Intelligence and Planning Research Center also included structural and geographic divisions with an emphasis on the Middle East, intelligence gathering roles, planning, and warning. In 1976, Finance Minister Yehoshua Rabinowitz decided not to implement the second stage of establishing the Political Research Center due to financial constraints. In late 1977, Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan, who sought to rid himself of responsibility for warning, appointed a commission headed by Aharon Yariv, which recommended removing the responsibility for political planning, i.e., including warning, from the Center. A notice to this effect, which also announced the change in name to the Political Research Center, was issued to the government secretariat. In 1992, Foreign Minister Peres resolved to establish a political planning division that was separate from the Political Research Center. i

The Situation Today: Diplomacy’s Goals,
Limitations, and Frustrations

The
Ministry of Foreign Affairs is responsible for formulating recommendations in
the realm of foreign relations. The test of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is
its ability to screen and analyze problems when they appear, to recommend
courses of action, and in particular, to implement decisions that were made by
others outside the Ministry. In practice, it is required to deal on its own
with all the other aspects of implementing foreign policy, such as cultural and
economic relations and the implementation of existing agreements (Gazit, 2002).

Today, the
official responsibilities of the Political Research Center include, inter alia:
research and analysis of countries, issues, trends, and processes in the Middle
East and the international arena; regular updating and dissemination of
information to the staff and the headquarter units and diplomatic missions abroad,
while addressing their needs and their requests; meetings and dialogues with
peer bodies in foreign ministries around the world; political briefings for the
decision making echelon and for international and other parties (such as foreign
diplomats, academics, and the media); management of the interface between the
intelligence community and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, at the Ministry in
Israel and abroad; and presentation of the annual intelligence assessment
within the political-security cabinet. 

there is a tendency in Israel to view the security-military component as a dominant and almost exclusive factor in the realm of national security and decision making, dwarfing the diplomatic component input in a way that has no parallel in the modern world. Israel pays a heavy price for this.

The establishment regards the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as a marginal partner in strategic consultations, due primarily to a number of images and claims, specifically: the Ministry’s professional orientation is to talk, rather than to do; and the correspondences of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and its diplomatic missions around the world deal mostly with insignificant and boring reports. In addition, Ministry of Foreign Affairs officials do not tend to take responsibility or adopt daring stances in their meetings. They will always prefer to take the official approach, recite Israel's formal position, and incur no risk. Rather, they will always look for the common denominator, similar worldviews, and values not points of contention. In doing so, they become irrelevant for problems solving (Drori & Oren, interview with Giora Eiland, 2016).

In
addition, there is a
tendency in Israel to view the security-military component as a dominant and
almost exclusive factor in the realm of national security and decision making,
dwarfing the diplomatic component input in a way that has no parallel in the
modern world. Israel pays a heavy price for
this.

For these
reasons, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs regularly, and at different
intensities, suffers from under-estimation among those making strategic
decisions. At the same, the security and intelligence system has become
increasingly involved in the diplomatic realm. Former head of the Intelligence
Directorate Aharon Ze'evi Farkash has explained the importance of intelligence
in the realm of diplomacy, with its integration into the struggle against
global threats and Israeli foreign relations.

Ze'evi Farkash highlighted two major realms in which it is imperative for Israeli intelligence to cooperate with other intelligence agencies around the world: global terrorism and the realm of nuclear weapons in general; and the Iranian nuclear program in particular. He regards intelligence as making a meaningful contribution to the diplomatic arena (Ze’evi, 2007) an observation that no one disputes.

Former head
of the Mossad Ambassador Efraim Halevy has stated that the military echelon
plays an important role in Israeli foreign policy, in its responsibility for
Israel’s relations with many different Arab states. He described cases in which
Israel’s prime minister acted contrary to the opinion of the professional
political echelon, and emphasized that this has usually resulted in the failure
of the effort. Such was the experience of the Oslo Accords that did not receive
support of the professional political echelon, and for this reason (among
others) it was not successful. On the other hand, Halevy has depicted the
military leadership as a powerful echelon that has had a significant impact on
the course of events. In addition to influence on the decisions of the
political echelon, the military echelon maintains contact and work relations
with Israel’s adversaries (Halevy, 2006).  

Erez Meisel
, who until recently headed the army’s foreign relations department within the
Planning Directorate, has explained the military’s increasing involvement in
the diplomatic realm as a result of the regional and global changes of recent
decades. From his perspective, the activity of the IDF’s foreign relations
department is part of Israel’s “foreign relations community.” That is, foreign
relations are no longer a diplomatic service but rather a decentralized
national effort, with the IDF’s foreign relations system playing an important
role in Israeli political diplomacy and the efforts of the state to expand its
relations with other countries. In this context, Meisel refers to a future plan
for empowering the IDF foreign relations system, which in part is intended to project Israel’s power and preserve and
expand its strategic depth.   

In contrast
to this approach is the voice of the diplomat Ronit Ben-Dor, who recommends
qualifying Meisel’s vision of “military diplomacy” and reducing its scope to a
less threatening definition of “security diplomacy,” as part of the national
strategic effort. In her view, this framework should take advantage of the
ability of the IDF’s foreign relations system to convey messages quickly and
reliably to adversaries and enemies in order to prevent escalation and a
downward spiral into war. These efforts according to Ben-Dor will not be able
to replace the diplomatic practices added value of presenting
non-military ways of thinking about complex political-security problems.

The
question of the asymmetric cooperation between intelligence officials and
diplomats also surfaces in Israel’s diplomatic missions. Within the most
important Israeli embassy, in Washington, DC, intelligence enjoys an advantage
in access to decision makers. The chief Mossad representative in Washington has
direct access to the director of the CIA and his associates, who brief the US
President on a daily basis (Drori & Oren, interview with Yoram Hessel,
2016). The communication room in the Washington embassy is managed by the
Mossad whose chief representative is not subordinate to the ambassador. As a
result, the chief Mossad representative reads all the reports sent from the
embassy, while no one is allowed to read his reports, unless he chooses to
share them with relevant officers inside the embassy (Hessel, 2016).

The heavy workload of the ambassador and his staff usually leaves very often room for intervention in “grey areas.” In cases such as the unit responsible for liaison with the US Congress, which plays an essential diplomatic role for the entire Israeli establishment, the Israeli Defense Ministry strives to create within the security establishment and detached from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs a parallel and independent liaison with Congress.

The
bolstered abilities and insights within Israel’s security establishment
sometimes lead to an effort by defense officials to blur the boundaries through
meetings with State Department officials, while at the same time they prevent
Ministry of Foreign Affairs officials from entering the Pentagon. The
boundaries are not sufficiently clear, and reason dictates that they should be
made clearer and that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs should insist on them, to
the extent that this is required for orderly staff work.

Joint military-diplomatic staff meetings are undoubtedly recommended. They allow transparency within the system, but only as long as it is clear who is in charge of access and content. Access to the US Congress and State Department, for example, should be the exclusive responsibility of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, while access to the Pentagon and the US army would naturally be in the hands of Israel’s Ministry of Defense. Elsewhere, work procedures in other major missions likewise have no regular open intelligence briefings for diplomats, despite the sometimes essential need to provide representatives with appropriate background in preparation for their political talks, and in some cases in preparation for tours on the ground. The recurring feedback from the intelligence community regarding reports of the diplomatic representatives is provided sparingly and not on a regular basis, and in most cases only after screening at the administrative level. ii

 The Political Research Center, which is
charged with updating the intelligence and assessments for all missions, which
in turn provide it with updated assessments, remains of modest means and a lean
budget. In light of the recommendation for intelligence analysis pluralism, and
despite its fluctuating status, the Center struggles for its proper recognition
and rightful share as a body contributing to the national situation assessment.
It is generally agreed that prior to war, leaders do not take action without
hearing its intelligence. In peacetime, however, the situation is completely
different, in part because peace, unlike war, requires greater attention to the
internal sphere and to political considerations. Most statesmen feel that they
understand the overall context just as well as the professional echelon,
especially when some of the study has been conducted directly vis-à-vis the
other side (Barak, 1988). This approach is also reflected in the words of
former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir: “I need intelligence to warn me of war,
not to teach me how to make peace” (Barnea & Shiffer, 2002).     

Whereas
most of the world’s foreign affairs ministries receive internal information or
rely on research institutes, the Political Research Center operates on its own
intelligence gathering and research, with the effective integration of policy
recommendations, both inside and outside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. As
examples of successful results, former Political Research Center head Benny
Dagan has mentioned promoting
the application of sanctions against Iran and placing Hezbollah on the list of
terrorist organizations. Similarly, the
refusal to lament Bashar al-Assad and the warnings of possible deterioration in
Gaza before Operation Protective Edge were important components of the
assessment. The intensive analysis of energy as a strategic factor is
considered a major success. Another relative advantage is the researchers, who
have been in their positions for many years, which is more than others in
similar positions within the intelligence community, and so is the Center’s
access to foreign ministries all over the world.

The intelligence gathering apparatuses are inundated with information that obligates and enables diplomats on the ground, who deal with it in any event, to become efficient “gathering officers” of immense importance, thanks to their access, training, and experience.

 According to Dagan, until 2006 most of the Center’s
employees were diplomats and the scope of its activities was limited. Following
the Second Lebanon War and the implementation of the Winograd Commission's
conclusions, the number of Center employees doubled and the volume of inter-system
summaries shared with it grew significantly. The Center became a partner to
more discussions, and it enjoys better relations with other agencies of the
intelligence communities. However, there is still room for improvement in the
intelligence community's attitude towards the Center as an equal partner.

The Information Revolution and the Future
of Intelligence Analysis

Over the
past few decades, the information world has undergone a revolution
characterized largely by the flood of political, social, and economic
information of the utmost intelligence value, in quantities and quality that
could not have been gathered in the past. The intelligence gathering apparatuses are inundated with
information that obligates and enables diplomats on the ground, who deal with
it in any event, to become efficient “gathering officers” of immense
importance, thanks to their access, training, and experience.

Data gathering of that kind obviously requires analysis and evaluation. The information revolution leads to the ongoing undermining of the traditional separation between the realms of gathering and analysis. Itai Brun, former head of the Intelligence analysis division of the Israel Defense Forces, pointed that while the direct access of analysts to the ocean of information is expanding, the logic of collaborating with the gathering branch in the analysis process is increasing (Brun, 2015). Hence the relative importance of diplomats' reports may increase, since their potential contribution to this process is the core of their occupation updates, evaluation, and analysis.

Intelligence
experts recommend establishing a network-based “joint space,” which enables the
development of shared knowledge in continuous discourse, crossing the
organizational boundaries of gathering arrays and becoming a fundamental
component of analysis work (Brun, 2015). The contact between the realms of research
and gathering in a joint space of this kind affords research personnel a better
understanding of information whose importance and value is not always
recognized by intelligence gathering personnel. Moreover, the intelligence gathering
personnel have in this case immediate feedback and a deeper understanding how
to channel better their activities.  

According
to Brun, the information revolution also requires a change in the in the way
intelligence is disseminated to the various consumers. Intelligence analysis
bodies are required to provide "analysis products" at a faster pace
than in the past and in a different, more accessible, and clearer
configuration. The “iNet” system, developed by the Intelligence Directorate’s
Research Division, makes it possible to present a continuous integrative
intelligence picture in a new intelligence language, including the integration
of text and pictures, video clips, audio, and infographics, and invites the
presentation of other, different opinions. It obviously requires intelligent
integration at the appropriate level of classification of the diplomatic system
including most of its branches and missions. (Brun, 2015).

Opportunity and Recommendations

The
information revolution has resulted in a situation in which the intelligence
services in Israel, which are responsible for the gathering and analysis of
information, can barely shoulder the load. Consequently, there is an
opportunity to take full advantage of the capabilities of the MFA Research
Center and accept it as an equal partner in the intelligence community. This junction
also provides an opportunity to upgrade the work of the missions, and may add
further depth and value to their political work. The way to realize this value
change and increase influence and contribution necessarily runs through the
Center for Political Analysis. It requires changes in thinking mode and
perceptions of the intelligence community.

The main necessary measures include:

1. The establishment and incorporation of the Political Research Center personnel and relevant headquarter elements in the proposed cross-organization “research analysis,” which will also include representatives of the intelligence community and the different bodies on the ground. The rise of the internet-based communications networks as an ongoing process, and with greater intensity during the current period of the Covid-19 pandemic, enables the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to expand the circles of internet-based consultation significantly. These circles of periodic consultation, which will include representatives of the intelligence communities on a regular basis with an emphasis on the analysis branches and external research bodies, will be documented, their summaries and conclusions disseminated, and the writing of research papers designated. Clearly, the more the other research bodies, i.e., the Mossad and the Intelligence Directorate, initiate such circles with the necessary coordination, the more the product will improve and its benefit will increase. The dividers between the intelligence attachés and IDF attachés will be removed in the regular work of the missions in key countries around the world, and joint EEI (essential elements of information), updating, and situation assessment meetings will be held. The process proposed here is a product of today’s reality and an understanding that the more compartmentalization is removed, especially with regard to gathering and assessment from open sources, the more the benefit to all the systems will increase. In this case, emphasis will be placed on fieldwork, in which diplomatic representatives enjoy a marked advantage due to their direct relationships with local elements and the fact that they know the local language, culture, and mood better than any analysis personnel working from the staff headquarters.  
2. As opposed to the claims that diplomats' shallow reporting and the failure to take a position constitute a “professional illness,” political reporting must be more central in the work of diplomats including in the case of diplomats who are not political advisors or Middle East experts. Political reports must be a regular part of all diplomats’ duties and a basis to the appraisal of their role.
3. The possibility of the Political Research Center and designated missions entering two different levels of iNet networks should be considered as soon as possible, in two levels: the field level and the level of bureaus and leaders, which are updated regularly and at the appropriate security clearance in all realms of EEI, gathering reports, and analysis. Such a measure would set regular and binding work procedures that will significantly help ensure the flow of the raw material, the processed information, and the assessment material in all directions.
4. The new Minister of Foreign Affairs is advised to regard the implementation of this measure as part of his responsibility and requirements vis-à-vis the Prime Minister. 

Conclusion

The Covid-19 pandemic is likely to generate substantial changes to the world order. Although the scope and significance of the pandemic are still not fully clear, it has already resulted in a dramatic increase in the scope of digital communication in its various forms as a relatively effective substitute for personal meetings, work meetings, and professional discussions. This trend serves to reinforce the assumptions underlying the opportunity that is presenting itself to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs today to change and adapt the method of work of the diplomatic missions around the world with regard to intelligence gathering and analysis. The information revolution, and the mounting importance of the social networks for intelligence gathering and the creation of joint networks for analysis, has endowed the diplomatic corps with the ability to undertake reorganization in which the missions are instructed to operate according to EEI, alongside the regular work based on the political agenda and the work schedule in the realms of public diplomacy.   

The opportunity presented to the diplomatic missions updating with the main points of intelligence gathering and analysis that are on the agenda and contribute directly to their efforts stands to improve the work of the missions in their other realms of activity, increase the standing of the Political Research Center of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the eyes of the intelligence community, and contribute directly to the national security of the state and the promotion of its strategic goals.  

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