The full Knesset plenum voted 56-36 in a preliminary reading to pass a bill that would create a new intelligence advisor and staff within the prime minister’s office who answers directly to the premier and is separated from the three big intelligence services: IDF, Shin Bet, and Mossad.
This is only the first of many steps toward eventually making such a bill law, but there is already significant controversy about whether the new post, as suggested, would solve gaps in intelligence which partially led to the October 7 disaster, or is being used as cover to further politicize the intelligence establishment.
There is a consensus among most in Israel that the intelligence and political classes both failed to foresee or prevent Hamas’s October 7, 2023 invasion of Israel.
No one agrees what to do about it.
This latest idea being pushed by MK Amit Halevi on behalf of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is to create a new intelligence advisor and staff within PMO. On its face, it is simply following the recommendations of the post-Yom Kippur War Agranat Commission to establish such an independent intelligence body whose purpose it to second-guess the other agencies.
The problem is downplaying threats
In English, such a body can be called a “red team,” or often an inspector general’s office fulfills such a function to make sure that a country does not get a security surprise because they have too much group-think that underplays a certain threat.
In Hebrew, this is called the “Ipcha Mistabra,” and the IDF and Mossad often establish their own backup or opposition teams to counter whatever the accepted wisdom is on a certain security topic.
The problem has been – and was certainly true on October 7 with downplaying the threat from Hamas – that too often such internal opposition teams pull their punches in criticizing the conventional wisdom, lest they endanger future promotion options with their chief.
Alternatively, sometimes the opposition teams express significant disagreement with the intelligence chief in question, but that chief pays no attention to their views and only has them file their views so he can check the box that he entertained opposing views.
From this perspective, having a new intelligence czar who does not need to worry about promotions from any of the three big intelligence agencies would seem to be a good way to ensure that the prime minister hears opposing views in a full and strident manner.
One obvious objection could be that this role of giving the prime minister a counter view on intelligence and national security and where the advisers are not working for any of the big three agencies, is supposed to be fulfilled by the national security council chief and his staff.
Making a new intelligence adviser may just be adding more bureaucracy and fights over resources between the NSC chief and whoever the new advisor would be. Top defense officials have asked why would just creating a similar new body with a different name lead to a better result? The NSC did nothing to challenge the big three agencies’s view of Hamas being deterred on October 7.
Some former intelligence officials told the Jerusalem Post that this new position would be different than the NSC.
They said that the NSC has too many responsibilities in foreign affairs, diplomacy, and security, where analyzing intelligence is just a small piece and can easily fall by the wayside.
Moreover, they told the Post that the NSC almost never looks at the raw intelligence at issue to be able to make its own fully informed potential separate judgment on the significance of gathered intelligence.
Rather, they said that the overworked NSC at most has time to look at the summary conclusions of the big three intelligence agencies of the raw intelligence, without really knowing whether there could have been a real dissenting view.
In addition, they said to the Post that most of the NSC staff are immediate and future members of the big three agencies, on temporary “loan” to the NSC.
This means that when they want to know about intelligence, they just call their old and likely future colleagues and bosses in the big three intelligence agencies to find out what the conventional view is and then simply pass that on to the prime minister.
If the new intelligence czar and his staff are more separated by a period of a few years from having worked for the big three agencies and are not expecting future work there, then they might be more ready to question the big three agencies.
Likewise, if their sole responsibility is intelligence, which is far more narrow than the NSC, then they should have more time to go beyond the big three agencies’ summary conclusions to view the original raw intelligence.
Still, even if some of the existing intelligence agents seem to support the change, some oppose it, and some do not seem ready to weigh in on it yet but have indicated concerns that this is a new politicization power play by Netanyahu.
One part of the new role is that it would not need to be part of any public vetting process.
This means that Netanyahu could pick an intelligence agent who he is sure will just support his policies, even if it is completely against the entire defense establishment and even if it is in a case where the prime minister’s motivations are entirely political or potentially corrupt.
For example, Netanyahu went against the entire defense establishment to push through purchasing additional nuclear submarines from Germany, part of what became known as Case 3000, the Submarine Affair.
While Netanyahu was never indicted for corruption, many of his former top aides were, and to date, any court and any commission probing the issue have been highly critical of his ignoring the defense establishment's view of the purchase.
They have said that it is difficult to explain his decision as being in the interest of Israel’s national security and that the way he managed the process may have opened the door to corruption, even if he himself did not directly participate.
Some also suspect that a new intelligence czar be used to drop all responsibility for October 7 on the other three agencies in order to whitewash Netanyahu’s role in the failure.
Other objections are that a new intelligence czar will be sidelined by the existing agencies and the NSC.
The new czar would have no intelligence collection capability, and the existing intelligence czars could decide to blacklist him from certain information or to give certain data only after they directly already told the data to Netanyahu, which is what happened with the now defunct Intelligence Ministry.
A similar fate happened to the Homeland Security Ministry, which briefly had some power in the same era but was eventually beaten out by the Defense Ministry and the IDF and closed down.