The Hamas attacks were a failure of intelligence — and they’re more common than you might think 

Hamas’s deadly and unprecedented attacks on Israeli military and civilian targets this month have been described by some as an intelligence failure on the part of Israeli intelligence services. 

From what we can glean from this far away, and without access to classified information, it would appear that such a characterization is accurate. Hamas’s attack required significant planning and coordination among multiple actors — at the border between Gaza and Israel, in paragliders, and at missile batteries in Gaza. It can be hard to believe that Hamas planned such an extensive attack without Israeli intelligence giving sufficient warning. 

That is, it is hard to believe if you are unfamiliar with the literature on intelligence failure. 

Intelligence analysts — those responsible for making sense of the raw intelligence collected by civilian and military intelligence agencies — are tasked with using incomplete and spotty information to answer complicated and consequential questions. When analysts have time to develop their expertise, gather evidence from all sources, and separate the reliable information (“signals”) from the false information (“noise”), they are valuable assets to policymakers, who desperately need their expertise to make informed decisions.  

Ultimately, intelligence agencies are better at providing this sort of information to lawmakers. Describing the capabilities of North Korean or Chinese intercontinental ballistic missiles, explaining the total collapse of the Venezuelan economy under President Nicolás Maduro and hunting down illicit finance that funds terrorism are all examples of where intelligence agencies excel.  

But, they often fail when it comes to predicting the future. 

CIA analyst training in the year 2000 included an intensive segment on causes and cases of intelligence failure. These included lack of communication between intelligence services (Pearl Harbor), overestimation of a rival’s capabilities (the fall of the Soviet Union) and over-reliance on liaison intelligence partners (the Iranian Revolution). As for 9/11, American intelligence agencies were fully aware of al Qaeda’s plans to attack a U.S. target but were unable to get specific information on the date, time and location of planned attacks due to lack of human intelligence assets in specific al Qaeda units. Lack of communication between intelligence services — in this case, barriers between the CIA and FBI intended to protect Americans’ civil liberties — was again one of the causes of the failure.  

In short, we know why intelligence failures happen, but preventing the next one is never guaranteed. Israeli intelligence services are no more infallible in this way than the American.  

From the standpoint of the public, the failures to warn are obvious, while the successes are invisible. A thwarted attack is a non-event that goes unnoticed by all except the people in the government and military members who were directly responsible for sounding the warning or preventing the attack. Israeli intelligence services have such a formidable reputation because they are often successful in blunting the effects of an attack, but this makes the failure to blunt the effects of this one all the more shocking.  

It is too soon to know the specific sources of this intelligence failure, but previous cases tell us that while the failure led to horrific consequences, the answers will be fairly mundane.

Renee Buhr, M.A., Ph.D., is a professor of political science at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. She served as a nonproliferation analyst in the Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation and Arms Control Center of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2000-2003.