Intelligence Scoop: Could Netanyahu Have Prevented October 7?

18:30Gordon:And it makes sense that foreign partners, the Egyptians, the Emiratis would pick up similar kind of little bits and pieces. And because the Egyptians and Emiratis have close security relationships with the Israelis, they would pass those along. So I'm inclined to believe it, not least because when you look at the Haaretz report, when you look at the Times reporting, these aren't like single sourced pieces. I mean, there's a multitude of Israeli security officials who are providing the information to corroborate these stories and to build these stories. So I'm inclined to believe it.

19:07David:And I mean, I think we know Benjamin Netanyahu is a political street fighter who has made his career on being the defender of the security of Israel. And so to have missed warnings or not take them seriously enough would be devastating to him politically. And he is a very, very canny political operator. I mean, I think it's also interesting because there are echoes here. I think, you know, we just did this series a few months ago on 9-11. It's not the same, but I think some of the issues are similar. where after 9-11, you had this question, had the politicians been warned? Had President Bush had warnings in his presidential daily brief that an attack was coming?

19:47David:Had he not taken it seriously enough? These become very, very political, the questions of was something missed? And it was a huge story for a number of years. But in the US, you did have a 9-11 commission, which eventually was able to answer those questions. And I think the absence of that just leaves you with kind of political street fighting over it. I think this is me.

20:10Gordon:The reason that Netanyahu has blocked any effort to create a national commission is because it is going to unearth exactly these types of facts and it's going to make it clear that there were warnings of all sorts bubbling up from within the Israeli system that made it to Netanyahu's desk, not all of them, but some of them, and that he received warning in advance from foreign partners like the Emiratis and the Egyptians and probably others that just haven't been reported to suggest that something is coming. This is, again, David McCloskey talking. I think he does bear real blame for the, not only the intelligence failure, but the policy failure in advance of October the 7th.

20:53Gordon:And it makes sense politically why he would want to just continue to kind of stiff arm that. I mean, the other thing is, you know, I think we You should note, the warnings are not particularly specific.

21:05David:No, I think that is important. A bit like 9-11.

21:07Gordon:A bit like 9-11. So that you could also plausibly say, well, okay, what am I supposed to do with this? Now, I think we'll come to this. I actually do think there are things that could have been done that would have maybe not prevented October the 7th, but would have made it much less of a tragedy than it was. All that to say, we're seeing that this wasn't just an internal Israeli military and security issue. This is a political issue at the Netanyahu level, and he didn't do anything about it.

21:34David:I think that's absolutely right. And in some ways, though, the issue of this phone call is only part of that wider question. Was there an intelligence failure? And if so, what kind of intelligence failure? So after the break, we'll be investigating that question.

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23:35Gordon:Welcome back. Let's step back, I think, for a minute to have a look at the very specific reports about the nature of the warning that the Israelis received prior to October 7th, and what kind of intelligence failure might have taken place on that day.

23:51David:That's right, because I think it is a much bigger question than just this report of a phone call, whether it's the Egyptian one or whether the UAE one. From the start, the question has been, how did Israel miss this massive attack? I mean, Israel, as we've talked about many times on this podcast, has one of the most adept, technologically advanced and aggressive intelligence and security services in the world. So to have missed something this big involving thousands of Hamas fighters engaging in a long-term plan is certainly an intelligence failure. And I think the interesting question is, what kind of failure was it and why did it happen?

24:35Gordon:It is worth setting up the different types of failures and what sort of constitutes an intelligence failure versus something else. and just the term gets thrown around a lot. And it's not as analytically useful as it could be if we just give it a bit more specificity. So I think about it this way. I think you can have a failure to predict. You did not see something coming and that could be driven by a collection failure. We talked about this in our 9-11 series, right? You actually don't have the information in your hands to predict. It could be driven by an analytic failure. Maybe you had enough of the information, but it's scattered throughout your system and it's not pulled together in a way that could be used.

25:19Gordon:You also can have organizational failures where that information exists, but it's kind of stovepiped in different security agencies or in different parts of security agencies. And so the whole picture doesn't come up to the policymakers who actually need to make the decisions. I think you could also have different types of analytic failure, particularly when you're dealing with the prospects for a terrorist attack. So we've just finished talking about this with the Haaretz reporting, is that you can have strategic warning that something is coming. And that could be correct.

25:54David:But if you don't have the tactical who, what, where, when, you're not inside the plot, the prospects for disrupting it go way down.

26:06Gordon:Although, put a pin in that because I think actually in this case, the Israelis didn't need tactical information to disrupt the plot or to potentially kind of mitigate its effects. But you could also have, and this is important, I think Netanyahu has wanted to make this an intelligence failure in the purest form. This is a failure of the security and military apparatus to see this coming and to stop it. But you can also have policy failures, meaning the political leadership receives enough information to make policy changes, and they don't. So they don't act on the intelligence that they receive.

26:46Gordon:So I think it's important to kind of lay out a bit of that construct, because I think as we'll see, October 7th probably ticks all of the boxes, to be quite honest.

26:58David:I think that's right. I think it's a really useful framework, because as we get into what the failures were, you can align them with your set of different failures and see how many are actually matching up against those. And it is, I think, very interesting to compare it to 9-11, where we've looked at and done a whole episode on the intelligence failures there. And we've got quite a few details from news reporting. There is an Israeli military report. There's one from Shin Bet, the security service. And I think one aspect which gets to your framework is that there was certainly an intelligence collection failure, wasn't there?

27:28David:And I think this is a really interesting one because they had loads of technical intelligence, didn't they? They have amazing penetration of mobile phones, they have drones, and have all these cameras and sensors on the border. But I think there's some evidence that they came to actually over-rely on that, to assume that that was enough, when actually what they needed was old-fashioned human intelligence as well.

27:51Gordon:Again, the 9-11 parallels are interesting because when the intelligence target is a terrorist organization, that means that they're highly secretive. these kind of plots are very compartmentalized inside the organization. So in other words, you could have a source in Al-Qaeda prior to 9-11, or you could have a source inside Hamas. If that source isn't inside the plot, you don't know about the plot. These organizations are also extremely paranoid. And so it makes it difficult just by virtue of the essence of the organization to recruit human sources inside them. I also think that the Shin Bet report that came out, this kind of after action on what went wrong.

28:33Gordon:The Shin Bet report found that the Israelis had a relatively poor network of human assets, spies inside Gaza prior to October 7th, because there was a botched intelligence operation that Shin Bet had run inside Gaza. Hamas uncovers it in 2018, rolls up a bunch of Israeli assets. So you get the sense that on the back of that, that the human penetration that Israel had of Hamas was perhaps not what it should have been and not what it had been a few years before.

29:09David:That's right. So that's, I think, one failure. The next one, I think, is that, again, making the parallel to some extent with 9-11, we had a lot about connecting the dots, the failure to join the dots, where you have intelligence, but you don't understand what it means. You don't put it together. I think that's interesting. It's slightly different with the Israeli case, the October 7th case. But there are lots of possible warning signs which frankly seem to have been overlooked. There's a very good BBC report by my old friend and colleague Alice Cuddy, which is about young female conscripts. They sit on surveillance bases right by the border in these rooms for hours looking at the live surveillance footage captured by the cameras on the high-tech fence.

29:52David:Also, they've got balloons that are hovering over Gaza. I mean, it's a hugely, intensely watched place. And it's watched by these units, often young women in their late teens and early 20s, who log what they see on computers and with their commanders. And in the months leading up to the attacks, they start to see things. They start to see practice raids, mock hostage taking, farmers behaving strangely on the other side of the fence. I mean, they see them actually doing things which are going to be what they do on October the 7th, practicing effectively the raid. I mean, they have a model tank.

30:26David:They practice how to take over. They have practicing of the explosives on the fence and how to coordinate moving through it and kidnapping people. They do pass these warnings up and they say that the military basically don't connect the dots. And some of those surveillance soldiers themselves end up being killed or taken hostage because they're right by the border on October the 7th. What I think is more astonishing as well is Israel actually had details of the Hamas plan. I mean, this is fascinating reporting, I think, which comes, a lot of it comes from the New York Times, where it says that they've actually got hold of a 40-page document, and it's codenamed Jericho Wall, initially conceived in 2016, discussing how to do a methodical assault to overwhelm border defenses and storm key military bases, including a local division headquarters.

31:19David:Again, all the things they end up doing are in a plan which the Israelis have got hold of.

31:24Gordon:This is where I think it's important to separate out the analytical failure from the collection failure. Because the fact that the Israelis get their hands on a 40-page document that essentially lays out what happened on October the 7th might suggest that it was less of a collection failure than one might think, because you've actually got the plan. Now, this is the important distinction, and why I think collection failure still is part of the story. You have a plan, but you may not have the intentions around that plan.

31:57David:Of when it's going to be executed.

31:59Gordon:When is it actually going to happen? Is it going to happen? Because Hamas probably has a lot of plans on the shelf that it may or may not use, and some may be aspirational or just kind of blue sky exercises. And so if you're the Israelis, how do you weight this plan? Is this a real thing? And what I think is interesting, though, and what kind of gets to the analytical failure is that when you pair that plan with what a lot of these female conscripts we're seeing at these surveillance installations on the border, when you kind of pair the two together, it looks like Hamas is rehearsing aspects of this plan, but yet the dots aren't really connected.

32:41Gordon:I do think it's interesting that this document, though, this Jericho wall document is circulated pretty widely in Israeli military and intelligence circles. I mean, it's seen by the IDF's intelligence chief, It's seen by the Unit 8200 commander, so the head of their signals intelligence directorate. It's seen by the Gaza division commander inside the IDF. It's seen by the leadership in IDF Southern Command, which is responsible for Gaza. What isn't clear, though, is if that report was shared with the political leadership and in particular with NetYahu. So you have this case where you get the plan or an outline of the plan.

33:18Gordon:Does it does it make it up to the political leadership? It's it's not clear it did. No.

33:24David:And Hamas, we should say, some of the other groups involved in the attacks actually rehearsed storming mock Israeli military bases and published some of this on their social media channels. There's a lot of indications because you also get some of these other warning signs in the run up just before. And there's an analyst from Unit 8200, which is Israel's signaled intelligence agency. It's the equivalent of GCHQ in the UK, NSA in the US. And a non-commissioned officer warns in an email sent to several officers up the chain in the days leading up to the assault that something is coming and to warn people while there's still time.

34:04David:I mean, these analysts at 8200 have put together a document on September 19th, so about three weeks before October the 7th, that warned Hamas was training for a large scale invasion. So, again, it's that specificity of what kind of thing. And this seems to be ignored. And this one particular female analyst warns in an email that the training they'd seen shows us that the Jericho Wall plan, the one we'd been talking about, is an operative practiced plan, meaning that Hamas already has the forces who've practiced how to carry it out and implement it when the order comes. Now, of course, you're right, that is not the same as knowing when the order's coming.

34:44David:But I think that, you know, that analyst is pushing up that warning saying something could be coming. And it goes up to a lieutenant colonel intelligence officer of the Gaza division who's responsible for the border, and he dismisses it. And it's only, I mean, I was reading about this in the Israeli press recently, only nearly three years later, very recently, that that officer, the intelligence officer who received the warning is dismissed after they fight against being fired for basically missing a warning.

35:10Gordon:The military report says overall that, quote, information was generally misinterpreted as an unrealistic or unfeasible plan. And that is a key point because it leads to what you could, I guess, call a failure of imagination. although listeners to our 9-11 series will know that I despise that term. I think what this really is, is a set of underlying assumptions about what Hamas was capable of or intended to do that turned out to be totally wrong. It is a mistaken belief that Hamas wouldn't be able to pull something like this off, and that it perhaps didn't even want to, which we can talk more about.

35:55David:You know, I do take your point about failure of imagination is a strange phrase, and I think its use in 9-11 is an odd one. I think in some ways, in this case, it's actually more relevant, because I think it is an underestimation of Hamas, of what it's capable of and what it wants to do, and the idea that it might want to do something strategically different from what it's done in the past. And if you have that mental framework for Hamas, then you're going to disregard intelligence, which challenges that framework and suggests they're doing something else. And this Israeli military report from February 2025 says it was assumed that Hamas was neither interested in nor preparing for a large scale war.

36:36David:It's also, I think, reinforced by Hamas's own deception tactics, isn't it?

36:40Gordon:Yeah, the deception tactics are interesting because it does seem like Hamas communicated that they had no intention of attacking the Israelis on channels that they knew the Israelis were listening to and monitoring, right? So you get this, the Israelis could be getting this intelligence to suggest, in fact, that nothing is coming. In retrospect, this assumption that Hamas didn't want to attack Israel in this way and wasn't able to pull it off in the first place seems insane. But up to October the 7th, 2023, the deadliest Hamas attack ever on Israel was a suicide bombing at the Park Hotel in Netanya back in 2002.

37:25Gordon:It had killed 30 people. So Hamas is killing Israelis with kind of one-off suicide attacks. There was an IDF operational concept that I think was published in 2019 that referred to Hamas as a kind of rocket-based terror army. So further, there's this thought that, well, if something big happens, it's probably a massive rocket attack, and we'll be able to deal with that with our surface-to-air missile defenses, Iron Dome, and the like. There's also an interesting twist to this from an intelligence historian named Michael Handel, who talks about the risk paradox. And he writes that the riskier a surprise attack appears to be.

38:09Gordon:And I think that Jericho wall plan, what happens on October the 7th, certainly looks to many in the Israeli security establishment like a crazy, risky idea, like a frontal assault on Israel from Gaza. So what in the world would they, why would they do that? That's crazy. Handel says that the riskier an attack appears to be, the quicker it will be dismissed as unlikely to occur, which is exactly what the Israeli security establishment does, thus in fact becoming less risky and likelier to succeed, right? Because it's been collected, seen, dismissed, and therefore that crazy plan is much likelier to actually succeed.

38:48David:Yeah, and I think the Israeli military report definitely gives this sense of flawed assumptions. It's interesting they also talk about what some officials call an addiction to precise intelligence, which was lacking. I think that's an interesting idea, is that they're so used in Israel to having very, very, very good granular precise intelligence and acting upon it. If you don't have it and you're so used to having it, then you assume you're not missing anything. The report says there was no deep discussion of the question, what if we are wrong? It's the ability to kind of red team, to have someone go, what if we're wrong?

39:22David:What if actually all our assumptions about Hamas are wrong? That was missing. The outgoing chief of staff of the Israeli defense forces at the time took responsibility for those failures, said, I embrace responsibility. It's mine. talks about how Gaza was seen at the time as a secondary security threat, because the priority was on Iran, it was on Hezbollah, it was on the West Bank. And the military had chosen this conflict management approach to dealing with Gaza, kind of keeping a lid on it. What that military report doesn't address was one of the other failures which you talked about at the start, which was the policy failure, the decision-making failure in the run-up to the attack.

40:00David:And I think that is the one which is crucial and which gets back to the Prime Minister himself of Israel.

40:06Gordon:Yeah, exactly. And I think, again, it ties back into Netanyahu's, I think, political calculation that he doesn't want there to be a national commission because a commission is going to shed light on exactly this, which is, yes, it's an intelligence failure, but it's also a massive policy and political failure. And that political failure, I think, is undergirded by many of the same assumptions about Hamas that we just talked about, which is that it's not capable of this kind of attack. It's deterred. It has no interest in fighting with us right now. And frankly, seen from Netanyahu's perspective, he's got much bigger fish to fry in the region, right?

40:47Gordon:I think that is an absolutely critical component of this. I mean, it's also worth noting that there had been fighting between Israel and another Palestinian terror group called Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Pij, that had occurred in the spring, I believe, of 2023, and Hamas had sat it out. And so I think you have this sense that it seemed, again, from Netanyahu's mind, that, well, Hamas is kind of deterred. The other angle we haven't talked about is the fact that Hamas was getting a lot of money from the Qataris, which was being sent into Gaza. The Israelis were allowing it to be sent into Gaza, which we could talk more about.

41:30Gordon:But I think Netanyahu's calculation was that, well, Hamas has consolidated its rule in Gaza. We're helping to facilitate funding for that. They wouldn't want to disrupt that by conducting a massive attack.

41:44David:Yeah, and I think that goes to this point about the policy failure and the strategic failure, which is, I think, an assumption at the political level that Hamas was in a box in Gaza, that they had it contained, that you could have this strategy of keeping it in a box. And there's the awful kind of phrase they use of mowing the lawn, which is just every now and again, you go and take out some of the militant leadership. But basically, you don't have to do anything differently. Netanyahu himself, I mean, we know has always been obsessed with Iran. That's always been his particular focus. We've talked about that in previous podcasts.

42:20David:Iran is his focus. Hezbollah is his focus. They are at the time a bit more worried about the West Bank. I mean, Netanyahu himself is also distracted by his own domestic reforms to the judiciary, which he's trying to push through, which are leading to protests. So I do think there is a policy failure, which is to think that the situation in Gaza was sustainable and contained and to not be focused on it and not to think about it and not to think about the implications and instead to be following other paths and other kind of avenues. And Netanyahu, of course, has been Prime Minister of Israel for the 13 of the 15 years before the attack.

42:57David:So if anyone bears responsibility for that policy failure, there's no doubt that it's him. I mean, no doubt about it. It's not like he can blame it on a previous government. Those wider strategic questions, I think, go to him, don't they?

43:11Gordon:They absolutely do. And I think it brings us to a question which is a little different from the intelligence failure question, which is, could it have been prevented or could the impact of the attack have been mitigated? And when we did our 9-11 series, I made the point, and it's impossible to know, because it's a counterfactual, I made the point that I didn't think ultimately that 9-11 could have been prevented, even if there had been better intelligence sharing between the FBI and CIA, on and on. I think in this case, because Israel essentially controls all of the borders to Gaza, with the exception of that southwest quarter to Egypt, the Israelis have more tools to use to prevent these kind of attacks.

43:58Gordon:And, you know, when you, for example, if if in response to any of the information that had bubbled up from inside Shin Bet or Mossad or the IDF anywhere, if in response to the information that had bubbled up or in response to the information that Netanyahu allegedly received from the Egyptian intelligence chief and the Emiratis of the weeks before, if you had done things like raise to the military alert level, for example. Or, I think more practically, if there had been any kind of military redeployment prior to October the 7th, you'd probably have far fewer people killed. Because 32 IDF battalions were stationed around the West Bank prior to October 7th.

44:48Gordon:Two were around Gaza, which gives you a sense of how dismissed all of this reporting had been. I mean, also, we talked about Unit 8200, the signals intelligence director, right? Their coverage on Gaza had been scaled down a few years before and was largely inactive on weekends. So you may not, again, you may not hear Yahya Sinwar describing the plot on a cell phone, but you might pick up more bits and pieces of the preparation if you had had more of a blanket kind of SIGINT coverage. Because when you look at the defense of these kibbutz, these Israeli communities that end up being overrun, I mean, some of them have as few as like five standby security members.

45:34Gordon:So if you had had more IDF presence in the area because of all these warnings, you may not have had the kind of the severity, the awfulness of the attack that that ends up happening. So I think the Israelis, all that to say, my view is that maybe it couldn't have been prevented from starting, but you could have significantly limited the severity if Netanyahu or if some of these security chiefs had said, we should take this seriously and do something about it. Even if we don't think it's likely, it's plausible and we should hedge our bets.

46:11David:And there were certainly enough signs that could have led them to do that. I think that's what's so interesting is that when you look at it in detail, you can see multiple failures. You can see the collection failure to penetrate the plot. You can see the analytical failures in not listening to some of the warning signs that people were trying to pass up the change. You can see the wider mindset failures in terms of the assumptions. You can see the policy and strategic failures. which is all to say that the specific warning that netanyahu gets you know this haretz report i think is is important but actually it isn't the whole story because i think you have to see it in totality the fact netanyahu doesn't doesn't listen to it allegedly and of course he denies it goes to a mindset he has and a wider set of assumptions and a wider kind of policy that he's pursuing and i do think you know there are levels of accountability in this which are important.

47:05David:But I do think they go to the top in this case. I absolutely do think it rises to the top. And in previous intelligence failures, you do see, in some cases, prime ministers take responsibility for when something like this has happened in Israel's past. And I think in this case, you see someone who is trying not to.

47:23Gordon:Why do you think he ignored the warnings?

47:26David:It's a good question. I think it may be he just dismissed them as more of the same. And it goes back to the kind of failure of imagination point. I think he is distracted personally and politically by his own survival, by domestic reforms. He also has a mindset which says the real threat is, if it's from the Palestinians at the West Bank, but really the threat is Hezbollah and really the threat is Iran. People are telling me this stuff, but it's not his priority. It's not the way his mind is formed, which is, I think, why it goes back to him. I mean, I do accept it may not have been a specific warning if of course he says there wasn't one at all but but i also think it goes to his his mindset that the reasons why he didn't act on it or see it as important i

48:07Gordon:also think it's something we an angle to the kind of netanyahu mindset that we haven't talked about which is i think he saw a hamas run gaza that was kind of fenced in and occasionally creating problems, but to use their terminology, you could mow the lawn occasionally. This being cropped up by funds that are being sent in by the Qataris that the Israelis are allowing in. I think he saw that as a good thing, right? Because it created divisions in the Palestinian community and the political leadership between the West Bank and Gaza.

48:47David:Makes a two-state solution less likely.

48:49Gordon:Exactly, which he doesn't want. And so everything you just said is correct, that there's a massive sort of underestimation of what Hamas would be able to pull off. But I also think he's living with this kind of underlying logic that Hamas is a threat, but it's a contained threat. And in that contained capacity, it's actually good for me, Benjamin Netanyahu, politically, because it means that I don't have to deal with the unified Palestinian front that's going to be able to push in a more effective way for statehood.

49:22David:Yeah. So I guess where we end up is there is an intelligence failure, but there's also a policy failure and a strategic failure, which leads to this devastating war and its consequences.

49:32Gordon:What do you think is the more dominant? Do you think it's more an intelligence failure or more a policy failure?

49:37David:I think if you had intelligence collection, which really said, this is coming on this day, then it would be hard to ignore. So I think there is a specific point of an intelligence collection failure, which might have made the difference. But I do think more broadly, the failure, for instance, to listen to the alleged UAE and other warnings and take them seriously and do some of the remedial steps you talked about, that is a political failure. So So I don't know. It's quite hard to separate. What do you think?

50:07Gordon:I think it is hard to separate because they're knitted together by the same underlying set of assumptions about Hamas's intentions and capabilities that I do think were largely shared by the upper echelons of the security and military community and by the political leadership. Even though obviously we've seen those two communities fall out since, I think they shared many of the same kind of assumptions about Hamas. So I think it is hard to separate them. I think that in my view, it is primarily a political failure. It's a policy failure because I actually think that the Israelis had strategic warning and they were in a position, given the fact that Hamas isn't a group hiding out in a bunch of camps in Afghanistan, thousands of miles away.

50:59Gordon:the Israelis actually had levers to pull to mitigate that risk. And those were policy levers that Netanyahu chose not to pull. So if I had to pick one, I would say it's a policy failure.

51:10David:Yeah. Well, the Israeli public will get their chance to vote on Benjamin Netanyahu's future. I think the elections are October the 27th, so coming up soon. I think, you know, given the Haretz report, some of the other reporting that's come out, this is certainly going to be one of the issues, which is going to be at the heart of that campaign. So we shall see how that unfolds. But meanwhile, for us, next week, we go to a bit of a corner turn, isn't it? We go back on Monday to Kim Philby, go back in time to a slightly different question of intelligence failures and why the Brits managed to miss the biggest Soviet mole within MI6.

51:49David:Back to that on Monday. And sitting alongside it. We have a great series on mole hunts, don't we? That's right.

51:55Gordon:We have gone deep into the literary impact of Kim Philby, the after effects of his espionage on both the US and UK intelligence communities. And we've had a conversation with a real life CIA mole hunter who was involved in uncovering a Soviet and Russian spy in the 1990s. So great, great bonus content for our beloved Declassified Club members. And just a reminder to everybody that you can join the Declassified Club right now by going to therestisclassified.com and signing up. We will see you next time.

52:36David:See you next time.

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