Iran and an Israeli intelligence officer who really knows what they're talking about

...The second dream is occasionally sparked by a nugget of intelligence that sends him back to the vistas of his youth. Sitting at a desk featuring the old, pre-revolution flag of Iran, he said, “My dream is to visit Iran again. And my real dream is to be [Israel's] military attaché in Tehran. That is my hope.”

Mitch Ginsburg..
Times of Israel..
16 December '13..

When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005 called for Israel to be wiped off the face of the earth, an uproar ensued. Had the Iranian president called for genocide — foreshadowing future characterizations of Israel as a germ and a cancer — or had this, as some translators suggested, merely been a poor government rendering of a rather nuanced metaphor, which called more gently for the “occupation regime” to vanish, ever so passively, from the pages of time?

A Talmudic-level discourse ensued. The Guardian’s Jonathan Steele, siding with the co-founder of the Mossadegh Foundation, called the genocidal interpretation “propaganda distortion” that enabled Western hawks to “bracket the Iranian president with Hitler as though he wants to exterminate Jews.” Ethan Bronner of The New York Times, after speaking with translation experts in the US and Iran, ruled that the passive “vanish” was wrong and that, while the word “map” had never been spoken — the quote referred to the pages of time or history — the phrase, in the original Persian, “certainly seems” to contain a similarly destructive intent.

In north Tel Aviv, at IDF Military Intelligence headquarters, one young, Iranian-born Israeli officer, who spent his days interpreting raw intelligence on the Persian desk, could only laugh. After all, that very quote, lifted from Ayatollah Khomeini, had been carefully painted by the regime on the side of the Jewish elementary school he attended in northern Tehran. “It’s the reason I’m sitting here,” he said in an interview.

Major M., who today serves as deputy commander of one of the units in the IDF Military Intelligence Directorate, has spent the majority of his service combating Israel’s top security threat, Iran. He is a small part of a significant and seemingly quite successful shift within the Israeli intelligence community, which, after years of following the Arab world, was forced to re-order its priority list and focus on an altogether different foe. Adapting to this shift is quite difficult, said one former Military Intelligence officer. “The language is different. The social, cultural, political mores are different. The history is different. All that changes the context,” he said. “You listen to two people speak and if you don’t have the context, you might not interpret it right.”

Major M.’s story and the role he fulfills in Military Intelligence, which can only be sketched in faint detail, illustrate a small part of a large and still-ongoing pivot that has helped Israel in its diplomatic struggle with Iran, its alleged operations on Iranian soil, its roiling shadow war abroad, and its larger understanding of the changing Middle East.

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Mitch Ginsburg is The Times of Israel's military correspondent.

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Military Intelligence, the Yom Kippur War and the importance of self-doubt

...An organization that has won a number of successes, which alongside the pride in its accomplishments does not ask itself if those same successes could not have been achieved faster, more efficiently, or with greater accuracy -- inches closer to sliding down a slippery slope; an organization that is content and does not promote the constant presence of doubt and unease -- is paving its way toward failure.

Maj. Gen. Aviv Kochavi..
Military Intelligence Director..
Israel Hayom..
06 October '13..

On the eve of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, an intelligence overview was presented to the government, which included 37 articles describing the enemy's intensive preparations on all fronts. The pinnacle of the overview was "Article 40" -- which has since become synonymous with a severe intelligence failure. It stated that, "The probability that the Egyptians intend to go to war is low."

The problem was not with the information, rather with how it was interpreted and how the Israel Defense Forces prepared as a result. The gigantic discrepancy between the facts and their analysis can be explained in many ways, but the most striking and important of them all was the sense of exaggerated overconfidence and the lack of doubt about what the enemy was planning to do, and under what conditions. This overconfidence, among other factors, stemmed from a series of prior successes.

An organization that has won a number of successes, which alongside the pride in its accomplishments does not ask itself if those same successes could not have been achieved faster, more efficiently, or with greater accuracy -- inches closer to sliding down a slippery slope; an organization that is content and does not promote the constant presence of doubt and unease -- is paving its way toward failure.

Military Intelligence has known extraordinary accomplishments in recent years. The breadth of information is enormous, of a high quality, and the technology and operations that make it possible improves on a daily basis. The quality of analysis and assessment is good, and even if it is not devoid of mistakes the analysis is even-keeled and in-depth.

All these factors contribute to a sense of self-confidence but at the same time create dangers. There is nothing wrong with being self-confident, but with two caveats: that it does not become overconfidence; and that alongside this feeling of self-assurance, and in a balanced manner, doubt will be harvested and consistently maintained. Confidence is not the opposite of doubt. Confidence is required to act with free instead of cramped thought, and confidence is a precondition for flexibility and daring. However, true self-questioning is the profound understanding that the scope of knowledge is limited, that another interpretation is possible, that other operational, technological or intelligence options exist. Doubt creates an atmosphere of unease, which invites constant re-clarification and the desire to learn and improve. Experience, though, has taught us that doubt is a cumbersome beast, sleepy and lazy and not easily stirred from its slumber.

A Special Draft

A new program of the IDF Intelligence Corps and the Akim Organization for the Rights of the Disabled is facilitating the enlistment of soldiers with special needs.


Arnon Ben-Dror
IDF Spokesperson
11 August '10

The joint effort by the IDF Intelligence Corps and the National AKIM Organization for Rights of the Disabled in creating a program to enlist soldiers with special needs is growing ever stronger. The first cycle of drafting resulted in the enlistment of five disabled youth. The second, which began in July 2010, includes eight new soldiers and in the third cycle, 24 soldiers are expected to enlist through this program.

The two first enlistees of this second cycle, Rinader (24) and Reuven (24), recently completed the draft process in the army induction center. They went through all of the stages, from the first step of being photographed, to receiving their official army IDs, to having the fingerprints recorded, to being administered vaccinations, to the final step of receiving their own uniforms. Throughout the entire process, these future soldiers showed much excitement and pride.

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