Missing the Arabs' War Signals

The early battlefield reports streaming from the fronts into the military headquarters in Egypt and Syria seemed too good to be true: light Israeli resistance at the Suez Canal and in the Golan Heights; Israeli reserves not mobilized; Israel's general population relaxed and praying in the synagogues. Yet the reports were accurate. The Arabs had accomplished what conventional wisdom had long insisted was nearly impossible -- a surprise attack on Israel.

The Arab onslaught, to be sure, was no Pearl Harbor. Israel's intelligence agents alerted the government several days before the invasion that the Arabs planned to attack. Israel's aircraft were not caught on the ground nor were its front-line troops dozing. In the weeks before Yom Kippur, Israeli intelligence had carefully monitored the buildup of Egyptian and Syrian troops. Yet Israel's intelligence organization, which won world respect with its almost uncanny ability to uncover Arab plans over the years and whose officials boasted that "Israeli intelligence is the best in the world," obviously failed for weeks to evaluate properly the information that it had gathered.

Military intelligence was aware that Egypt was increasing its troop strength along the canal, but it tended to accept Egyptian announcements that the buildup was a military maneuver. The Egyptians had held such maneuvers for the past ten years; there was no indication that this year was any different. Moreover, Cairo gave no hint of anything unusual. There were no air-raid drills, no stockpiling of materiel and no rhetoric aimed at preparing the Egyptian public for war. When Syria moved its troops ten miles forward from its secondary line to the 1967 Golan Heights cease-fire line in the hours before the attack, Israeli intelligence officers first interpreted it as a normal rotation of units.

Sadat's Smokescreen. Diplomatically, there was no indication that the Arabs had finally decided to invade; in fact, quite the reverse. Egypt's President Anwar Sadat had been openly telling visiting Western diplomats that the Arabs could not possibly win a war against Israel. His well-publicized fence-mending operation with Saudi Arabia's conservative King Feisal, his urging that Arab oil be used as a long-range commercial and diplomatic weapon against Israel, and the slight rebuke he gave Libya's hawkish strongman Colonel Muammar Gaddafi by delaying the proposed merger of Egypt and Libya--all these acts implied that Sadat was not thinking about imminent war.

American officials detected the Arab buildup in satellite spy photos and expressed some alarm, but Israel discounted the danger. Explained one U.S. intelligence expert: "The Israelis are right there, and they should know. This time they did not read the signals right." By last week an Israeli Foreign Ministry official privately admitted that, "what was coming out of Cairo was a smokescreen. What Sadat was trying to do was obvious--lull us into a security that was not there." But Israel also helped lull itself into a sense of false security. Since the devastating victory over Egypt, Syria and Jordan in the Six-Day War, Israel's political and military leaders have evinced a confidence that may have become self-deluding. They discounted the Arabs' ability to keep military secrets, to mobilize quickly, to supply troops in the field, or to coordinate a two-front attack. Israel assumed that in any future battle the Arabs would turn and run as they had in 1967.

Even if Israel had been more alarmed, however, its options were limited. During the week before Yom Kippur, at a cabinet meeting called to discuss the Arab buildup, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan urged that Israel begin mobilization. That would have been a first step toward Israel's launching a pre-emptive first strike against the Arabs. The U.S. government opposed such a move, as did Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir and Finance Minister Pinhas Sapir. They were wary of Dayan's aggressive plan because they concluded that such an attack would infuriate world opinion, leaving Israel open to charges that it started the war. They also reasoned that Israel could hardly afford to mobilize each time the Arabs increase their strength along the frontier. If Israel mobilized in response to every Arab move, the Arabs would have the nation on a yoyo, feinting buildup after buildup merely to wear Israel down. Intelligence analysts, moreover, still could not say with certainty that the Arabs would attack. Thus the Cabinet voted down Dayan's call for mobilization and a first strike against the Arabs.

Week Since. In the week since the attack, Israelis have been arguing among themselves about the wisdom of not attacking first. The Jerusalem Post, not ordinarily a critic of the Meir Cabinet, editorialized: "If Israel decided against a pre-emptive attack, giving the Egyptians and Syrians the combat initiative, this is not an exercise that the nation will want to repeat for many years."

To avoid repeating it, Israel will probably overhaul much of its intelligence apparatus in the hope of getting a more accurate evaluation of the Arabs' intentions in the future. As an immediate measure, Major General Aharon Yariv, who headed Israeli intelligence when it masterminded the 1967 strikes against Egypt's airfields, has been appointed a special adviser to Israel's Chief of Staff David Elazar. The tough, cunning Yariv angrily remarked that while Israel held back "in order to demonstrate its desire for peace, we did not expect to be penalized for it."

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