Strategic Assessment

• Book: Intelligence and October 7
• By: David Siman-Tov and Ofer Guterman
• Publisher: Maarachot Publishing; Israel Intelligence Heritage & Commemoration Center; The Institute for the Research of the Methodology of Intelligence
• Year: 2025
• pp: 208

The trauma of the surprise attack of October 7, 2023, and the tragedy that followed it, have accompanied Israel ever since. It is therefore only natural that efforts to explain how Israel was caught off guard (again), and what must be done to prevent a future repetition of the same mistake, should stand at the center of research on the war and the lessons to be drawn from it. This is the focus of the volume Intelligence and October 7, edited by David Siman-Tov and Ofer Guterman, recently published in a joint imprint by Maarachot, the Israel Intelligence Heritage & Commemoration Center and the Institute for the Research of the Methodology of Intelligence. The contributors demonstrate close familiarity with developments within the IDF Intelligence Directorate (Aman) and other intelligence bodies, and it is there that they seek the roots of the failure.

Some of the contributors argue that the cause lies in the shift in emphasis of Aman’s perceived role over the past two decades—from strategic warning of war to efforts to provide active intelligence support to combat operations, primarily through the continuous provision of targets within the battlespace (intelligence-based warfare). This effort yielded very impressive results during the war itself, yet, according to this argument, it came at the expense of Aman's core mission: providing strategic warning of war.

Other authors focus on the absence of an open and inclusive culture of discourse within Aman’s hierarchical military framework. Still others express astonishment—once again—at the failure to devote adequate attention to conspicuous indications of an impending attack in the years preceding it. The blindness to these warning signs is explained by familiar factors: the “conceptual framework,” groupthink, confirmation bias, and the sin of pride or overconfidence (hubris)—with 2023 compared to 1973.

Yet these explanations suffer from several substantive problems. First, it is evident—partly from the volume itself—that Aman’s record of failure in strategic warnings of war is consistent, long-standing, and predates developments of the past two decades. In practice, Aman failed to provide a warning during the Rotem Crisis in 1960, when Egyptian forces entered Sinai without Israel noticing, failed on Yom Kippur in 1973, and—like the Americans, albeit in a relatively distant arena—failed to anticipate Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. We will not include its failure to predict the Six-Day War in 1967, since even Egypt’s President Nasser, who recognized Israel’s military superiority, did not seek war and did not aim for it over the preceding years, until he drifted into escalation in the crisis of late May 1967. However, we could add false positive warnings, such as the assessment that Sadat’s 1977 announcement of his intention to visit Jerusalem was nothing less than an Egyptian deception plan ahead of war. Over the course of 65 years, Aman has never succeeded in providing accurate strategic warning of war.

None of the explanations in the book comes close to accounting for such an unequivocal record on the part of an intelligence organization that is nevertheless regarded as one of the best of its kind in the world. It appears that the contributors’ very expertise on and close focus on Aman actually work against their analysis, producing a narrow, parochial bias.

Indeed, in their introduction (p. 5), the editors note “the claim advanced in academic intelligence studies, according to which all surprise attacks that initiated wars caught the adversary unprepared.” This “academic” claim is mine, from my article Strategic Surprise—Always? (September 18, 2024), published by the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS). The editors add that this “cannot serve as an argument for mitigating the severity of the intelligence failure. Historical evidence of successful warnings of surprise attack intentions are indeed sparse, but they do exist (a recent example can be seen in the American and British warning regarding Russia’s intention to invade Ukraine in February 2022).”

However, the success of US intelligence in warning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine—which is also taken from my article—is not actually one of “a few” examples. Rather, as reported there, it is the only case of such success following a dozen successful surprise initiations of war throughout the twentieth century, when the mechanization of warfare first created extensive opportunities for such surprise initiations of war. In all other cases, without exception, the attacker succeeded in surprising its opponent. Moreover, in this context it would have been appropriate to mention the fact that Ukraine itself, despite repeated US warnings, refused almost until the last moment to believe that Russia was intent on invading.

Most importantly, the volume should have asked what makes the Ukrainian case distinctive: How did the United States manage to issue a warning in so singular a manner (with British intelligence apparently drawing on the American assessment)? The answer to this question—previously only conjectured—has recently received a fairly clear formulation in Bob Woodward’s book War, which has also been translated into Hebrew (2025). It appears that there is almost no one in the senior US governmental and military establishment who did not provide extensive interviews for the work of this prestigious journalist. What emerges is that the United States possessed a “golden piece of intelligence” from “inside the Kremlin” already by late 2021—at a time when many within Russia’s inner circle, including Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, were still not privy to the decision that had been made to invade (see pp. 67, 69, 77, 81–82, 92, 102, 109, 111–112).

It thus emerges that, apart from this single case of a “golden piece of intelligence” obtained well in advance of the attack, there is no real variation among instances of strategic surprise at the outbreak of war—all of which succeeded in achieving surprise. Whether involving democracies or dictatorships, profoundly different cultures, or varying degrees of involvement by intelligence organizations, foreign ministries, and political leaderships, there are no particular failures or biases that characterize one case over the others and can therefore be deemed responsible for the failure.

Among the principal explanations I identified in my earlier article for the recurrent error in assessing an adversary’s intention to initiate war—even in the face of evidence of massive enemy force concentrations along the front—were the following:

• The buildup is perceived as merely an exercise, one of many routinely conducted by the opposing side.
• The opposing side fears an attack on our part and is therefore reinforcing its front accordingly.
• This is a case of “sabre-rattling,” simulating brinkmanship in an effort to extract political gains.

Surprisingly—once again, seemingly as a result of its narrow, parochial perspective—the volume on the surprise of October 7 also makes virtually no reference (aside from a single passing mention by one contributor) to the pioneering work that founded the study of surprise and remains the most important contribution to the field. This is Roberta Wohlstetter’s classic book Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, originally published in 1962 and—by a bitter irony—issued in Hebrew in 2023, on the eve of the war. Wohlstetter’s central insight was that indicators of an approaching war are always inextricably mixed with signals pointing in other directions (“noise”), some of them random and others the product of deception. Only in hindsight, she argued, do the former shine with unmistakable clarity—prompting the familiar reaction of “how could we have missed this?”

Hindsight itself constitutes a profound form of cognitive bias.

This was the case in 1973 and in 2023, as well as in every one of the dozen attempts at achieving strategic surprise at the outbreak of war during the twentieth century—all of which succeeded. As noted, for each of the signs that in retrospect appear as clear as daylight, there were at the time highly plausible alternative explanations.

The Hamas operational plan known by the IDF code name “Jericho Wall”, which reached Israel in several iterations prior to the war, was an operational plan rather than an operational order. All military organizations maintain such plans for a range of contingencies. The reconnaissance tours conducted by Hamas commanders along the border and the training of its units—reported by IDF observers and by other means—were interpreted as part of the organization’s routine effort to sustain jihadist and operational readiness within its ranks. The same logic was applied to threatening statements by Hamas leaders, which prior to the war were dismissed as mere bombast, but in its aftermath were recast as unmistakable warning signs. Such rhetorical posturing is hardly uncommon in the Middle East. The stringent compartmentalization and deception measures employed by Hamas’ leaders Sinwar and Deif, and above all Hamas’ non-intervention in rounds of fighting between Israel and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, were interpreted as indicating a desire for quiet. In this context, the failure to raise the level of operational alert along the Gaza border in the hours preceding the invasion, in order to avoid exposing intelligence sources, was perhaps the single most important cause of the disaster.

None of this is intended to justify the failure. The issue is not one of exculpation or blame, but of achieving a deeper understanding of the gap between intelligence perception in real time and retrospective interpretation, as revealed with unmistakable clarity by the success of every instance of strategic surprise at the outbreak of war—whether against Israel, by Israel (1956, 1967), or in all the dozen cases in the history of the twentieth century.

This bleak record is difficult to digest and accept, and it naturally prompts further questions—not least whether it implies that intelligence organizations have little value when it comes to strategic warning. Let me briefly restate what I wrote on this in my earlier article. First, the US success in Ukraine underscores the importance of a “golden piece of intelligence”—information from the horse’s mouth—if it can be obtained. I will not address here the question that has resurfaced recently as to whether Marwan Ashraf (“the Angel”)— Nasser’s son-in-law and Sadat’s confidant who spied for Israel—was a double agent prior to the Yom Kippur War. At present there is no way to determine this with certainty, and the truth may be complex. Still, he provided Israel with a “golden piece of intelligence” regarding the war on the night before it began, enabling the wheels of the critical reserve mobilization to be set in motion, even if the decision in Israel was delayed until the morning after.

Moreover, the question of the capacity of Intelligence agencies to provide a warning is not zero-sum. Even prior to Marwan’s tipoff, and despite Aman’s assessment that ruled out war, it provided a comprehensive picture of enemy force concentrations along the Egyptian front and, in particular, along the Syrian front, where the geography left no room for error. Against this backdrop, the IDF reinforced the Golan Heights in the week preceding the war by deploying the 7th Armored Brigade—without which the Golan would almost certainly have fallen.

Finally, even in the absence of a “golden piece of intelligence” and of information pointing to threatening concentrations of forces—and precisely in light of the universal failure of strategic warnings of war—every effort must be made to ensure that minimum measures to prevent military collapse are in place along the various fronts, even in the event of surprise. This does not mean that one can perpetually prepare against capabilities rather than intentions, as some have suggested; such an approach would impose an impossible burden. Rather, a basic minimum defensive capability must be adopted in the face of realistic threats. Indeed it was none other than Eli Zeira, head of Aman in 1973, who described in his book (Myth versus Reality: The Yom Kippur War, Failures and Lessons, 2004, p. 36; in Hebrew) the practice that prevailed in the early 1960s, when he served as head of the Operations Branch of the General Staff under Chief of the Operations Directorate Yitzhak Rabin. In every case of a dangerous enemy buildup along the border, the IDF immediately took steps to raise alert levels and reinforce forces. All of this, of course, within the operational and budgetary constraints and limitations that existed at the time, as they do now.