Rarely have the heads of Israeli intelligence services been so talkative. In September 2023, a year ago, the leaders of the Mossad, the Shin Bet and the IDF jostled to the podium to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War and learn the lessons of what then constituted the greatest security failure of the history of Israel. At the time, in 1973, the Israeli army was surprised in its sleep by a joint attack from Egypt and Syria, whose armies were able to advance almost without resistance for two days. A historic humiliation for the intelligence services of the Jewish state.
But, fifty years later, the atmosphere has changed. “The Israeli army is now on guard, ready to face any threat,” triumphed Herzi Halevi, the IDF chief of staff, in a speech on September 28, 2023. Mossad Director David Barnea he emphasized, to what extent Israel had equipped itself with a “competent intelligence apparatus and remarkable power”, with “humility and skepticism” as the key words. A week later, hundreds of Hamas terrorists emerged from the Gaza Strip to murder nearly 1,200 Israelis and capture more than 200.
October 7, like Pearl Harbor or September 11
As in 1973, Israeli intelligence was blinded by their enemy, or rather made the mistake of remaining blind. They thought Israel was safe from the threat of Hamas, behind the imposing barrier full of new technologies which separated them from the Gaza Strip. Above all, they believed that the terrorist organization had too much to lose by attacking the Jewish state. “All these speeches returned to the errors of the past: overconfidence, hubris, undervaluation of the enemy, the need to neutralize its military capabilities before it strikes,” lists Assaf Orion, former strategic director of the Israeli army They could have — and they should have — combined these wanderings with the present. On October 7, it was not stars that aligned, but black holes, which revealed years of dysfunction. of our intelligence services.”
From October 8, there was a brutal awakening for the Mossad, which coordinates external intelligence, and for the Shin Bet, internal intelligence. Very quickly, internal investigations established that the agencies had for months discovered Hamas’s plans for these attacks, including kidnappings of Israelis, but that this information had been discarded because it was considered improbable. “On the Israeli side, the bankruptcy of October 7 is above all a failure of the imagination, believes Chuck Freilich, former Israeli national security advisor and professor at Columbia. As with all the great security disasters in History, Pearl Harbor to September 11 through Operation Barbarossa, all the information was there, but the individuals refused to believe it. No one in Israel judged that Hamas was capable of doing what it did on October 7. .” As in 1973, we must then rebuild and learn the lessons of the fiasco, while waging a war against the enemy.
The heads of the intelligence services are the first to recognize their responsibility in October 7. Even if the Mossad is not responsible for the Palestinian question, considered to be a matter of internal security, the agency admits to having been “surprised” by the Hamas attack and shares the blame. Only the director of military intelligence, Aharon Haliva, has resigned so far, but the director of the Shin Bet and the chief of staff are expected to leave their posts at the end of the war. “The Israeli security establishment has remained the same since October 7, points out Assaf Orion. Reforming and regaining control takes time: I myself joined Israeli intelligence in 1984, and we were still living with the trauma of the Yom Kippur War of 1973, we were taught the shame of this failure, but also the lessons to be learned from it. It takes decades to recover from such an event.
The tarnished myth of an all-powerful Mossad
This long and titanic work has already begun behind the heavy closed doors of the Mossad headquarters, in the suburbs of Tel Aviv, whose maxim remains “the guardian of Israel never sleeps”. “The intelligence agencies have already conducted in-depth internal investigations, and reforms are starting to be put in place, without public announcement of course,” points out Chuck Freilich. For the moment, no national commission of inquiry has been set up, due to lack of political will. “However, this is the only way to obtain major progress in Israel, but Benjamin Netanyahu constantly rejects it for fear of being blamed,” continues the former national security advisor.
As long as the war continues, reforms must wait. In its offensive in Gaza, the Israeli army demonstrated the destructive power of its weapons, killing more than 40,000 people, the majority of them civilians. At the same time, its secret services are showing the effectiveness of their targeted assassinations. In one year, Hamas and Hezbollah saw their commands decapitated. “The Mossad had built a reputation of the order of myth, but this legend of an all-powerful intelligence agency was severely shaken by October 7, notes Clara Broekaert, analyst at the Soufan Center, a specialized American think tank in security. The Israelis realized that they could no longer rely on cyber surveillance and automated systems, but on the contrary they had to return to human intelligence, to physical sources. indeed a model in this area.” On July 31, Israeli services succeeded in eliminating the leader of Hamas in the very heart of Tehran, in the palace reserved for foreign heads of state, with essential complicity within the Iranian regime. A taste of Mossad’s redemption.
On September 17, Israeli services detonated thousands of Hezbollah members’ beepers across Lebanon and as far as Syria, illustrating another lesson of October 7: reversing the use of old technologies by its enemies to its advantage. “Hamas had carried out its attack using primitive technologies, such as paragliders to fly over the barrier, which took the Israelis by surprise, notes Clara Broekaert. The Israeli army turned this system against Hezbollah, showing that it can also leverage low-tech means of communication, such as pagers and walkie-talkies, moving up supply chains.”
This series of operations also changed the fear of the camp. In ten days, at the end of September, Israel eliminated the entire command of Hezbollah, including its leader Hassan Nasrallah, through airstrikes. A feat which shows the depth of Israeli infiltration within the Lebanese militia and which sows paranoia from Beirut to Tehran. In a surreal interview given to CNN Türk on September 30, former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed that the head of an anti-Mossad unit in Iran had been unmasked as an agent… of Mossad. “100%, the Iranian regime is as infiltrated as Hezbollah by Israeli agents,” assures Yonatan Freeman, specialist in international relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Israel had good relations with Iran before the Islamic Revolution of 1979. and relies on the many opponents of the regime for its operations. The next attacks could aim to destabilize the regime with targeted executions.
A sign that the threat is taken seriously by Tehran, the security of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, has been further strengthened since the death of Nasrallah. Cutting off “the head of the octopus”, as former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett nicknamed it: undoubtedly the ultimate redemption for the guardians of Israel.
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