"Kishalon Vehatzlakha Behatra'a" ("The Israeli Intelligence Assessment on the Eve of the Yom Kippur War") by Arieh Shalev, Ministry of Defense, 318 pages, NIS 85

Now that 33 years have gone by since the Yom Kippur War, Arieh Shalev, head of the Military Intelligence (MI) research division during the war, has written a book about it. Shalev headed the division for seven years before the Agranat Commission, which probed the war, recommended his discharge. Prior to this position, he held a whole series of intelligence jobs, at staff headquarters and in the field. He was considered one of the best and brightest of MI, and rightly so.

At the back of the book is a letter from MI chief Aharon Yariv that was sent to Shalev when he retired from active duty a year before the war. "Throughout this period... intelligence research, under your command, played a critical role in the service MI provides to Israel's military and political leadership. Without the work done by you and your team, I cannot imagine being able to carry out my own duties. You were literally my 'brain trust.'"

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So we are talking, then, about a sourcebook written by no less than the "chief brain" of the intelligence corps in those days.

Shalev has no complaints about the decision to sack him. On the contrary, he submitted his own resignation long before the commission published its tentative findings, but was asked to wait until the final decision was reached. He accepts and justifies the conclusions regarding his personal responsibility, and openly admits that both he and his department were mistaken. On the other hand, he disagrees with the Agranat Commission's definition of what that mistake, or series of mistakes, was. In consequence, he believes that the conclusions reached by the commission are wrong and have no professional basis.

Shalev's book is thus the best textbook around for intelligence officers. Indeed, it is as if portions of it were written for an intelligence officers' course. Other parts grapple with weighty issues related to the division of power and responsibility: between MI and those who act on the information it collects, between those who assess - as opposed to those who gather - intelligence data, between the army and the political echelon, and between the military and political echelons and an official commission of inquiry. The failures of that time are a test case for those seeking to learn from the past.

Five failures

The author lists five intelligence failures on the eve of the Yom Kippur War: misjudging the character of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat; failing to spot the changed assessment among Egypt's leaders regarding the army's ability to launch a limited attack and capture part of the territory east of the Suez Canal; failing to appreciate the strategic implications of the Soviet supply of medium-range ground-to-ground Scud missiles to Egypt; failing to recognize the significance of Syria's moving its ground-to-air missile batteries closer to the border with Israel; and finally, the mistaken prediction, in view of all the above, that Sadat was unlikely to go to war.

The author rightly emphasizes that Israel had an excellent intelligence-gathering apparatus at the time, including reliable sources in high places. Thus it was almost inconceivable that Sadat would change his fundamental outlook without so much as a hint of it reaching Israel through one of these sources. Taking a broader look, Shalev writes that MI may be responsible for sizing up the opponent, but assessing the balance of power between Israel and each of its enemies is the job of the executive branch of the Israel Defense Forces.

Every branch of the IDF, up to the chief of staff, as well as the defense minister, believed at the time that the army's regular forces could hold off any attack by the Egyptian and Syrian armies. This approach was founded on an extra-large dose of self-confidence, and Israel's finest generals subscribed to it.

"We have one of the greatest armies in the world," declared Ariel Sharon, who was GOC Southern Command until the summer of 1973, in an interview with the Maariv daily. "Today I don't believe there is a military or civilian target from Baghdad to Khartoum... that the IDF could not conquer. In the next war, Egypt's pullback line will be Cairo. Israel is so strong that defense is no longer its biggest problem." This, as we all know, is why the reserves were not called up - not because there was no war alert.

Shalev held the key post of head of the research division for six years before he was asked to appear before a government body for consultations. Even then, he was invited only because the MI chief was sick that day. Until then, only the head of MI attended meetings of the cabinet or the Knesset Foreign and Defense Committee. Shalev was summoned on October 3, 1973, three days before the Yom Kippur War broke out.

At this meeting, chief of staff David Elazar said: "Technically, it is possible that Israel could be attacked on very short notice by Egypt or Syria.... I must say that such a scenario is slightly more likely today than it was in the past, because of the anti-tank missiles." Just how seriously this statement was taken was illustrated by what happened next: As soon as Shalev rose to speak, he was signaled by various participants to keep it short. Minutes later, the defense minister was handed two newspapers, into which he buried his nose for the remainder of the meeting.

Responsibility

Of all the issues analyzed in this book, one of the most important and relevant for today is Shalev's discussion of the interface between the army and the political leadership. The author's view, which is a common one in the IDF, is that when the army presents an assessment or suggested course of action to the political echelon, its job is to persuade the leaders of the correctness of its assessment and the logic of this course of action. The moment the government adopts the army's assessments or recommendations, or the prime minister opts for an alternative, responsibility shifts to the government. It then becomes the government's assessment and decision.

On this critical issue, what could be better than to quote Yitzhak Rabin, who was elected prime minister in the wake of the Agranat Report and the public outcry that brought down Golda Meir's government: "I saw in this report a grave and objectionable attempt to introduce new and unacceptable norms in the political-military relationship.... Saddling the army with sole responsibility while clearing the government of all wrongdoing... seriously undermines the government's authority over the army.... When a war ends in victory, both the government and the army take credit for that achievement. When it ends in defeat, or something goes wrong, the army is left an orphan.

"In the future, the chief of staff will say to himself: I am placing all the material at my disposal before the cabinet, along with my recommendation. Until now it was clear beyond the shadow of doubt that from the moment the political echelon accepted my recommendation and ordered me to act on it, we shared responsibility.... As prime minister, it has never occurred to me to adopt the approach that lies at the core of the Agranat Commission's conclusions, with its warped division of responsibility between the government and the IDF General Staff."

A related issue discussed in the book is the degree to which the government and those who head it are obligated to accept the findings of a state commission of inquiry. When the Agranat Commission submitted its interim report to the cabinet of Golda Meir, the newly-appointed labor minister wondered out loud whether the cabinet could return it and say: "We have not received an answer regarding civilian responsibility, so first finish your work."

The justice minister informed the new cabinet member - Yitzhak Rabin - that the Agranat Commission is a sovereign entity and no one can tell it what to do. It is worth noting that this statement by the justice minister has never been tested in a court of law, and it is not at all certain that the High Court would adopt this stance.

Shalev dwells at length on whether the government and prime minister must implement the conclusions of a commission of inquiry. He devotes a whole chapter, entitled "Organizational Lessons," to the subject. He writes about the recommendation to appoint an intelligence adviser to the prime minister, and how MI chiefs Shlomo Gazit and Yehoshua Saguy, and Mossad chief Nahum Admoni, opposed the idea. Rabin put off choosing such an advisor when he was voted into office, but eventually gave the job to Major General (res.) Rehavam Zeevi, in addition to his duties as the prime minister's adviser on terror. Menachem Begin took Major General (res.) Yehoshafat Harkabi as his intelligence adviser, but Harkabi bowed out soon after, when he realized the job was only for show.

The commission's second recommendation was to cultivate greater pluralism in the sphere of intelligence evaluation. Toward this end, it proposed the establishment of assessment units in both the Mossad and the Foreign Ministry. In its recommendations concerning the Mossad, a basic flaw was exposed in the work of the commission: It recommended that the Mossad evaluate only intelligence data gathered by its own sources. What good is it to evaluate partial data? This gave MI chiefs over the years an excuse to keep important information to themselves rather than share it with the Mossad. In this way, a recommendation of the commission became a liability in itself. Shalev, like many of his colleagues, is against this decentralization of responsibility for intelligence assessment, and he offers some valuable insights on this subject.

Settling scores

Shalev writes in sparing, dispassionate prose, with the exception of those passages where he settles the score with friends who claim that he ignored them when they warned him of the dangers. Audible in the background are echoes of the bitter arguments that went on in those days in the corridors of the military intelligence corps, although the author demonstrates a great deal of restraint toward those who publicly defamed him.

Among the other important issues Shalev raises are the reliability of sources in high places and the danger of becoming overly dependent on the information they supply; the difficulty of predicting a leader's decisions, analyzing character and anticipating shifts in behavior; and the difficulty of understanding and decoding conversations between leaders, such as the one between King Hussein and Golda Meir a few days before the war.

In the final chapter, Shalev reveals that the most important tip-off, received two days before the war, had to do with the rush to ready Sadat's war room. This piece of information only reached the MI chief and intelligence researchers three months after the war began! These words are italicized in the book, and they are the only ones in the book accentuated this way. If this information had been forwarded in time, writes Shalev, it would have tipped the scales in favor of declaring a war alert.

This is the one instance in the book where the author is maddeningly vague. Who passed on this information? Why wasn't it disseminated? What became of the person responsible for this appalling oversight?

The publication of this book is amazingly well timed in terms of its relevance for today. It should be required reading for the political leadership of this country, as well as all future commissions of inquiry, lest they make the same mistakes as the commission that probed the Yom Kippur War.

Efraim Halevy, former chief of the Mossad, is the author of "Man in Shadows: Inside the Middle East Crisis with a Man Who Led the Mossad," published by St. Martin's Press.