Israel Conflict Challenges U.S. Intelligence

Stakes are high for CIA and other intel analysts to get it right

Veteran former CIA analysts well remember the hours and days they spent urgently scrambling to determine exactly who carried out the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.  Like their CIA brothers and sisters assessing the horrific events in Israel and Gaza today, they knew broadly who was responsible, but needed to come up with unequivocal proof of who did it. 

Nothing short of the political map of the Middle East, and the U.S. role in the region,  was at stake. Today’s Hamas-Israel conflict poses similar existential questions.

“It’s really daunting,” former CIA analyst Gail Helt says, describing the atmosphere inside the analysis directorate when major events like the 9/11 attack and this month’s surprise Hamas invasion of Israel, followed by the troubling strike on a Gaza hospital, erupt.

Smoke rises after an Oct. 9 Israeli air strike in Gaza (AP Photo/Fatima Shbair)

“There’s immense pressure. Nobody wants to get it wrong,” she told SpyTalk. “And there’s the sense that people’s lives are hanging in the balance as you try to figure out what stream of sourcing is actually accurate here.”

No event frames that issue more acutely than Tuesday’s fiery explosion at Gaza City’s Anglican Church-owned Al Ahli Hospital, which Hamas says killed nearly 500 people. Major U.S. and foreign news organizations quickly accepted Palestinian claims that an Israeli bomb was responsible, only to reverse course when video emerged seemingly backing up intelligence gathered by Israel, corroborated by the U.S. “with high confidence”, based on its own “overhead imagery, intercepts and open source information,” that an errant missile fired by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another group of Gaza militants, was to blame. 

“All these internal Hamas lines of communication lit up simultaneously,” a U.S. counter-terrorism official who has seen the U.S. intelligence told SpyTalk.

“They were all talking to each other and saying the same thing, which was that Islamic Jihad fucked up and misfired a missile,” he continued. “They also said they had to be really careful with how they discussed this because while they didn’t want Hamas to take the blame for the explosion, they also didn’t want to throw an ally like Islamic Jihad under the bus.”

The dispute remains unsettled.  Faked videos and deliberate disinformation add to the allies’s challenge of sorting out truth from fiction—and persuading global audiences they are right. Israeli and U.S. agencies have gone into high gear to counter accusations on social media.

None of the Israeli and U.S. explanations have dampened the rage of Muslims and others around the world that Israel was responsible for the carnage.  The so-called “Arab street” has erupted in violent protests across the region, forcing Jordan’s King Abdullah, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to cancel their planned meeting with Biden in the Jordanian capital, Amman.

Collateral damage

A day after the Hamas attack, an Egyptian policeman opened fire on a group of Israeli tourists in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria, killing two. A teacher in France and two Swedish nationals in Brussels were murdered by suspected Islamists. Following  the murder of a six-year-old Muslim boy in Illinois, the FBI is closely monitoring increased threats against both Jews and Muslims. In his prime-time address Thursday evening,  President Biden was expected to urge Americans not to let their passions over the latest cycle of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict descend into violence here at home.

“Perception is nine-tenths of reality,” the U.S. counter-terrorism official told SpyTalk on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue. “So even if there’s a mountain of evidence that Israel didn’t do it, it doesn’t change the pre-existing facts surrounding the overall situation in Gaza, which is that it’s a small, fenced-in enclave overcrowded with more than 2 million people who’ve been under a relentless siege by Israel for 17 years.” 

Against that history, this official said, the Israeli and U.S. intelligence on the hospital blast “don’t stand a chance.” 

Today, U.S. and Israeli intelligence are intensely focused on assessing how Iran and its proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and elsewhere are responding to the crisis, not to mention the condition of the more than 200 hostages Hamas took during its Oct. 7 rampage.

The CIA, responsible for strategic intelligence, is also double-checking “what are the Israelis telling us versus what they’re not telling us,” former CIA analyst Cynthia Storer told SpyTalk, reflecting a timeless adage in the spy business: There are friendly nations, but no friendly intelligence services. 

The CIA also must be able to tell President Biden what leaders of the Arab countries surrounding Israel are privately thinking about the attack. Publicly, they put the blame on Israel and the U.S., but U.S. eavesdropping units and spies are responsible for finding out what they really think. 

Although Hamas's initial attacks are now in their rear view mirror, CIA analysts will also be tasked with coming up with a definitive answer on how the group managed to pull off such a complex and sophisticated operation without tipping off Israeli and Western intelligence agencies, along with the extent of Iran’s direct involvement in the operation. Public reporting, based on leaks in Israel and here, finger a variety of causes for the surprise, ranging from Hamas’s clever deceptions to the obsessions of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rightwing government with neutering Palestinian resistance to expanding Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.  

The job begins with analysts combing through the intelligence community’s databases on all these questions, including past reports from the CIA’s Middle East-based operatives and transcripts of Iranian, Syrian, Hamas and Hezbollah telephone conversations and emails, largely gathered by the eavesdropping, code-breaking National Security Agency. 

“The first places you check are what did we already know, what did we think we knew, and what did we think the gaps were,” said Storer, part of a mostly female team of analysts — dubbed "The Sisterhood" — who led the effort to locate Bin Laden. 

“The CIA, the NSA, everybody will be going back through the files to see if they missed anything,” she said. “Did something end up on the cutting room floor? We’re going to be talking to everybody else’s intelligence services to see if they knew something.” 

“And then,” she added, “the analysts are going to look at who said what, the background of those people, and reexamine if they are reliable. Have they lied in the past? We go through all of that for every claim that’s made and for every person who makes a claim. We have to be very careful about what we put forward as a verified fact, as opposed to ‘this might be true,’ as opposed to ‘we have no idea.’” 

An additional headache: sources—ranging from former foreign officials to retired CIA experts who ring the Beltway—who claim inside dope but are actually out of the loop.

"One thing you have to be wary of in these situations is people who had expertise and knowledge of the situation before but are no longer current,” Storer says. “They'll say stuff that may have been true years ago, but it's no longer true. And  government officials will reach out to these folks outside of their own intelligence agencies. And sometimes what those folks say clashes with what those of us on the inside are saying."

Linda Weissgold, who capped a 37-year career at the CIA when she retired in April as deputy director for analysis, says a senior manager’s first duty is to sort out a cacophony of demands for up-to-the-minute intelligence.

“There are only so many hours in a day, and managing competing priorities in a crisis is key. Those pushing Israeli intelligence for answers now on what went wrong, are unintentionally encouraging shallow answers and are detracting from the immediate work that needs to be done. I know this from personal experience,” she wrote in an essay for The Cipher Brief, a CIA-friendly news site.

It’s critical for the analysts to look forward—to the threat of a wider regional conflict, she said. Once the current war is over, she added, there will be plenty of time to review past reporting and answer such questions as the reasons for Israel’s intelligence failure and what Hamas hoped to achieve by launching such a murderous assault.

“In the aftermath of 9/11, Benghazi and the fall of Afghanistan, many analysts were forced to focus backwards, pulling together binders of information on the warnings we gave, rather than looking ahead,” Weissgold wrote. “This is so often the case that in my personal definition of analytic tradecraft—being able to explain why an analyst thinks what they think—I always add that it also means being able to explain why you thought what you thought years later when there is an investigation.”

Into the Ether

The intelligence agencies are repeatedly vexed by the agendas of the politicians they serve, from the White House to the congressional intelligence oversight committees and beyond. The most notorious case of cranked up intelligence in recent CIA history was the intent by neo-conservatives in the Bush White House, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, to affix blame for the 9/11 attacks on Saddam Hussein rather than Osama Bin Laden, which led to the misguided and ultimately tragic invasion of Iraq. 

“Every time {Cheney and his aides] brought up another theory about the Iraq connection, we had to run it down, go look up everything, check with sources and see if it could be true,” Storer recalled in an interview. “We couldn’t go home, we didn’t sleep very much; we just took cat naps. The only food we had was what the spouses of our colleagues brought in, and we had to eat that on the run. We couldn’t take showers, so finally they opened up the gym. Our managers had to bring in toiletries for us, the cost for which came out of our pockets. For weeks we worked like that.”

“Finally,” she said, “our managers decided we weren’t going to talk to Cheney’s people anymore. They gave us the names of some people to whom we were to refer them when they called. They called me directly once. I told them whom they were supposed to talk to and then said ‘Excuse me, but I’m really busy now trying to prevent further terrorist attacks, so go the hell away.’” 

In the end, Cheney and then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfled established their own intelligence analysis group at the Pentagon. 

“They cherry-picked the intelligence to make their case [for the Iraq invasion],” Storer recalled,  “And of course, they portrayed us as piss-poor analysts who obviously couldn’t put things together correctly.”

Likewise today, some quarters were quick to pin the attacks on Iran. The Wall Street Journal, quoting unnamed Hamas and Hezbollah officials, said Iranian officials planned and financed the Hamas operation and gave a green light to the terrorists at an Oct. 2 meeting in Beirut.

Former CIA analyst Diana Bolsinger has her doubts. “Hamas has a degree of independence and a degree of capabilities that all concerned underestimated,” she told SpyTalk. 

“You can’t rule out the fact that The Wall Street Journal is owned by the Murdoch family,” said Helt, who spent nearly a dozen years at the CIA, during which time she briefed senior-most policy makers. “Their agenda when it comes to Iran in terms of U.S. politics is they want us to take it out. So I would be very reluctant to base an analysis on that piece.”

But Helt does not rule out the possibility that the Journal story accurately reflected what sources claiming to be from Hamas and Hezbollah told the paper. In that case, she said she asks herself, what do these sources hope to gain? Could this be an exercise in denial and deception? 

“If these really are Hezbollah and Hamas sources, they could want to create a broader Middle East conflagration,” Helt said. “They might be trying to goad us, or the Israelis, or both of us, to do something that will get all their regional allies involved to wage an all-out war against Israel.” 

But she says the sources also could be hardline anti-Iranian Saudis or Emirati agents posing as Hamas and Hezbollah officials and who want to see the United States go to war with their arch enemy Iran,” she said. “Honestly, this could be a lie conjured up by these two sources for their own reasons. As a CIA analyst, I’m asking myself those kinds of questions.”

Iran, which has trained, armed and financed Hamas since the 1990s, says it had no direct role in the Oct. 7 attack. Adding credence to Iran’s claim are the United States and Israel, both of whom say they have seen no intelligence indicating a direct involvement in the attacks.

“We are looking actively to see if there’s evidence — intelligence evidence and facts that point to specific Iranian participation in planning and resourcing these attacks,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told NBC News. “We just haven’t found it.”

In fact, the U.S. counter-terrorism official told SpyTalk that the Hamas political leadership, which sits in Doha, the capital of Qatar, was surprised by news of the attack, which was planned under strict operational secrecy and executed by the group’s military commander, Mohammed Dief. This official said probably no more than five other Hamas commanders knew about the plan, adding that such tight secrecy helps explain why U.S.intelligence officials said Iranian government officials also were caught by surprise by the Hamas attack. 

It may take years—even decades—before the full truth is known. Emerging secrets about other seminal events over the past century are still revising historical accounts. Many remain buried.

"We, as analysts, know that we're not going to know the full truth for quite a while, if ever," said Storer. "I'm not just being a skeptic. It's always the case that there's more known than people are willing to admit."