Strategic Assessment

• Book: "The Devil's Advocate": A Journey Through the Depths of Israeli Intelligence Supervision
• By: David Sternberg, David Siman-Tov, and Doron Matza
• Publisher: Institute for the Research of the Methodology of Intelligence and Maarachot
• Year: 2023
• pp: 133 pages [in Hebrew]

The authors of the book, which examines the supervision body in the IDF Military Intelligence Directorate (known as "Aman") through a detailed and documented genealogical review, have produced a compact, informed, comprehensive, and above all, important and singular product and contributed to a subject that has not been discussed much outside the intelligence community. Their access to internal Aman documents, some of which are still classified and therefore do not appear in the book, adds a touch of interest and originality to the work and helps to consolidate insights and arguments.

The book, comprising six chapters, leads readers on a journey through the intricacies of the supervision world. In the first chapter, the authors present the concept and the institution of supervision in Aman and the historical background to its development. In the second chapter, they describe the incarnations of the organizational structural and methodological supervision over five decades, from the day of its establishment to the present. The third chapter presents the world of supervision through their personal experience, in retrospect and from a sober contemporary perspective of four senior officials who headed the supervision department at Aman or held a senior position there. Each focuses on a central issue that he dealt with during his service there. The four cases presented in this chapter, expanding the outlook and illustrating the methodological and essential dilemmas of the supervision world, are: the unilateral withdrawal of the IDF from Lebanon in May 2000, with an emphasis on the very decision and its implications; the surprise appearance of a C-802 cruise missile in the hands of Hezbollah in the Second Lebanon War; the discovery of the nuclear reactor in Syria; and the surprise of the Arab Spring. In the fourth chapter of the book, the authors look at regions outside Israel and seek to illuminate the issue of intelligence supervision in the United States, Great Britain, and the Netherlands. The fifth chapter refers to the less successful attempt to make supervision an institution of the entire intelligence community, focusing on the limited attempts at supervision in the Mossad and the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet), and dealing with several attempts to operate a joint supervision institution. In the sixth chapter, the authors focus on the current and future challenges of supervision in the age of information. The book concludes with an epilogue summarizing the importance of supervision despite its limitations, and the challenges that lie before it.

The writers’ skills and professional experience in the worlds of intelligence content are impressively reflected in the quality, clarity, and focus of the writing. All these contribute to a book that is a must-read, be it for people from the world of intelligence or those just interested in the field. The introduction by the head of Aman to the book and the decision to honor the authors with his 2022 award for creative thinking indicate the importance of the book to Aman, and in my opinion, to the entire intelligence community.

The book is interwoven with well-honed sayings chosen by the authors in an intelligent and interesting way, which serves the purpose of engaging the readers and emphasizing important and central messages. For example, they open the introductory chapter by quoting the immortal saying of General George Patton: "If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking" (p. 8). I don't know if this saying was or became the motto of the supervision department at Aman, but it deserves to be on a poster hung in every office and meeting room in the department, and it should also be taught to every intelligence officer, and certainly to senior officers and decision makers at the political and military levels.

In the introductory chapter, the authors probe the foundations of critical thinking in the Jewish tradition and in Greek culture. From there, their historical journey continues through the Renaissance period to the worlds of contemporary management, business, and organizational psychology (pp. 9-10). In their view, the term "supervision" is fundamentally problematic due to its etymological relationship in Hebrew to the world "criticism"—they insist that it should not reflect the idea of the "devil's advocate" or "ifcha mistabra" (the dissenting or opposite view). The term "red team" is more appropriate in their eyes (p. 11) even though in the end, in their understanding, all these concepts converge into one common purpose: "refining intelligence thought and quality" (p. 11). The Israeli body for supervision, which was established following the traumatic intelligence failure of the Yom Kippur War, is defined by the authors as "a sign and example throughout the world of the uniqueness of the Israeli intelligence establishment in thinking differently and in a pioneering perspective" (p. 11). The authors conclude the introductory chapter by presenting a number of research questions that they seek to answer, and emphasize the important motto in their eyes: "Without an institution of supervision, there is no culture of supervision" (p. 12).

The authors are careful to distinguish between supervision as a technique and supervision as an essential component of organizational culture. They seek to establish the distinction by answering three questions, which should be asked by the supervising entity and the heads of organizations: "The first is related to the nature of the analysis: engaging in details, or the big picture? The second is, what is the starting point [differentiating between four different approaches—pp. 17-18 ] of the supervision arguments in relation to the research position or the object of the supervision? The third, what and how much should be made public, and how should it be made public so that supervision is properly implemented?" (p. 15).

Particularly interesting and constructive is the comparative analysis made by the authors between the four approaches or starting positions: "devil's advocate," the shadow approach, alternative thinking, and peer review. The analysis is summarized in an enlightening table that compares the different approaches, with reference to four criteria: comparison to the leading argument, the product, direction, and dominant feature (p. 19). Despite the differences between the approaches, it is necessary in all of them to disconnect from an existing situation and an existing intelligence assessment. In addition, although it is a trivial matter, the authors recognize the difficulty of applying any of the approaches "in the very ability to distill and attack the research argument...[because] most of the time, the research arguments are not written clearly enough (regarding the firmness of the statement) or focused enough (several arguments mixed together") (p. 19).

The third question about what, how much, and how to make public presents the fundamental dilemmas of supervision very clearly. The founding idea of supervision is "to shock, upset, shake, and destabilize." These are mechanisms designed to sow doubt and interest, and they take a toll on the supervision's ability to function over time. This is mainly due to the consequences of the method of operation on reciprocal relations, and to some extent, also on personal relations between members of the supervision department and the research division. Likewise, the supervisor's ability to remain relevant "along the research avenue (discussions at the level of branches, arenas, and division heads) may be compromised, hence his ability to react in real time and be relevant to ongoing events." The professional quality of the supervision diagnoses is also challenged, because it is not always the case that "all the details are taken into account, or because supervision does not have sufficient familiarity with things that were said and done" (p. 20). The authors find an answer to these limitations, even if partial, in the dialogue between the supervision and the intelligence researchers. According to their approach, "the significant advantage of this method is that it creates, for the researchers, a mediating mechanism of the nature of the criticism, which negates their sense that the criticism is aimed at them personally, and emphasizes that its purpose is to assist them in the act of evaluation, and that they are part of a non-adversarial process" (p. 21). The authors recommend finding the golden path between the confrontational approach and discourse.

Another important dilemma that the researchers refer to addresses the tension between the need to engage in a variety of topics and the focus on defined and limited areas of knowledge or issues. Here too, the researchers emphasize the necessity of a balanced approach, which will prevent the supervisor from being perceived by intelligence researchers as troublesome and not thorough or professional enough, or one who is limited to a circumscribed field of knowledge.

In the last part of the chapter, the authors refer to the question of supervision's involvement in areas that go beyond the assessment of the intelligence itself. They return to this issue in the chapters on supervision in other countries, referring to the role of supervision regarding the training of intelligence investigators and regarding the supervision's reference to the intelligence work processes and organizational and structural aspects of the intelligence community.

The second chapter, in which the authors describe what they term the genealogy of the supervision department over the course of five decades, is interwoven with primary source documents that they have accessed and not only give a flavor of historical authenticity but also an interesting and authoritative point of view, which greatly contributes to the chapter and the book as a whole. The authors identify four main periods spanning five decades and present each period in terms of the success of the supervision, its contribution, the system of interrelationships with the research division on the one hand and with the head of the Aman on the other hand, and the changes in its organizational structure. In describing the characteristics of the periods, the authors succeed in raising a series of methodological, organizational, and essential dilemmas of the supervision work, and they outline the process of supervision development characterized by ups and downs, achievements and failures, and organizational changes that reflect, inter alia, the attitude and importance that Aman chiefs attributed to supervision, until the decision by then-head of Aman Tamir Hayman to make it a civilian body. They conclude the chapter by emphasizing the personal dimension, which is related to the identity of the head of the supervision department and the triangle of relations between the head of the Aman and head of the supervision department and head of the research division (p. 56).

The third chapter, which deals with the issue of the success of supervision through the ages, the range of its functions, methodology, and modus operandi, and all while referring to the three questions raised in the introductory chapter, is a particularly interesting chapter. Its uniqueness lies in the personal angle of four narrators, who relate to the questions and dilemmas at the heart of the book through the prism of their personal experience in four significant and formative events from an intelligence-research point of view. The chapter enlivens the book and the topic and embellishes it not only anecdotally but in a very matter of fact, substantial, deep, and informed fashion.

The fourth chapter provides the reader with an "overseas view" of the development of supervision in three countries. The choice to include the United States and the United Kingdom is easy to understand, because these are two intelligence powers. Less clear is the choice in the test case of the Netherlands, which is not a prominent or particularly important country when it comes to the world of intelligence. A more interesting example would have been Germany, France, or Italy, as long as those intelligence communities have supervision bodies. In any case, this is an interesting and thought-provoking chapter, which reviews the historical developments that led to the establishment of supervision bodies and outlines their character and the characteristics of their operation (both in aspects related to intelligence research and in aspects related to the supervision of intelligence work processes and the organizational structure of the intelligence community in those countries). This expands the basis and infrastructure for advanced comparative research, alongside a broader and richer perspective with reference to the Israeli case.

The fifth chapter examines the weakness of supervision, its failure in the Shin Bet and the Mossad, and the failure of the unimpressive attempt to establish a community-wide supervision body. In this chapter, the authors also expand on the role of supervision with reference to non-intelligence issues that relate to the IDF itself or the "blue team" and the expectations that some IDF commanders and others had for a more expansive approach to supervision. At the end of the day this converged and narrowed down to its original purpose—supervision over the products of intelligence research and the work processes and the organizational structure at Aman.

The sixth chapter is a forward-looking chapter. The starting point is the contemporary period and the challenge of dealing with big data and a flood of information, along with a series of perceptual biases related to the technological world ("the algorithm as a black box," p. 115) which is advanced and updated, and the way information produced by technological means in general. In this chapter, the authors present the characteristics of the challenges of the current period and of the future, and emphasize the changes in the working environment of the intelligence offices and the necessity of the supervision to adapt itself to the changes. The authors identify the main difficulty in "the age of information [which] intensifies the challenging asymmetry in size (in resources) between the supervision department and the intelligence enterprise...[which deepens the] gaps that already exist in the ability to go over the material, as well as in thematic specialization. On top of that, there is an increasing gap in the technological skill of the supervision personnel...[and all these alongside] the trend of placing increasing trust in quantification and automation" (p. 112).

In the epilogue, the authors wish to summarize their assessment of the supervision institution based on the findings, the discussion of the research questions, and a look overseas. The main message in my eyes is their conclusion regarding the nature of the supervision's failure or success, which "lies not in the nature of its assessment against the test of reality, but in the fact that it encourages competition over the interpretation. Competition is a mechanism that incentivizes research to excel, sharpen and progress, and clarify to itself and its consumers the mask of assumptions and difficulties upon which it rests" (p. 123). The essence of the supervision is paradoxical in the eyes of the authors, when on the one hand it derives its status and legitimacy from the system, and on the other hand, its subversive action challenges the system and is based on the idea of pushing an alternative conceptual option to the conceptual option of the system. The authors have much confidence in the head of Aman and his attitude to supervision, and find a high positive correlation between the degree of trust the head of Aman has in the head of the supervision department and the effectiveness of the supervision (p. 124). The fact that the supervision institution has survived five decades, despite structural changes along with changes in the limits of its activity and responsibility, indicates the authors' assessment of the stability of the institution and its necessity. The authors' conclusions are reasoned, substantiated, and summarize an important book, which deserves to be read and studied in the intelligence community and beyond.