Daily Alert Archives

In Defense of the Intelligence Services

(Economist-UK) Efraim Halevy - When commissions of inquiry investigate intelligence failures of extraordinary magnitude, their conclusions inevitably have an overwhelming influence on the conduct of intelligence chiefs and their political masters for generations to come. Several assumptions and concepts, implicit or explicit in the reports, warrant close study. I wish to take issue with the findings on both terrorism and the WMD. Three times within close to a quarter of a century, Saddam Hussein has attempted to develop capabilities in the field of WMD, with emphasis on the nuclear area. In the early 1980s, Israel destroyed his French-supplied nuclear reactor. In the early 1990s, the first Gulf war, launched after Iraq invaded Kuwait, revealed extensive Iraqi activity in all three WMD fields (nuclear, chemical, and biological); the UN destroyed some of these capabilities after the war, and tried to monitor others before it withdrew from Iraq in 1998 and was not allowed back. In the years leading up to the American-British invasion of Iraq in 2003, there was evidence that Saddam was trying to renew his nuclear and ballistic missile programs, and to restore his original capabilities. Nobody outside Iraq knew how far he had succeeded. On the terrorist scene, it became obvious when two American embassies, in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, were simultaneously attacked in 1998, that al-Qaeda had entered a new phase in its war against the U.S. This threat was clearly recognized by the American intelligence community. Serious collection efforts were initiated. However, I believe that if the CIA had come up with proposals to adopt measures like those that were hastily implemented after September 11, 2001, the American public would not have been capable of approving them. I have reason to believe that George Tenet, the director of the CIA who resigned in June and left in July, got it right on both key issues. He correctly assessed the terrorist threat, and his basic approach to the Iraqi conundrum was similarly accurate. The fact that WMD have not yet been found in Iraq is no proof that there was nothing there; those who can conceal complete squadrons of aircraft in the sand could easily act similarly when it comes to WMD. Efraim Halevy was head of Mossad, Israel's intelligence service, from 1998 to 2002. Since 2003 he has been head of the Center for Strategic and Policy Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
2004-08-03 00:00:00
Full Article