Oct. 7 Was an Intelligence Failure, Maybe of the U.S.

Senior Israeli intelligence officials have publicly acknowledged that the horrific Hamas surprise attack on Oct. 7, 2023, that killed roughly 1,200 Israelis was a massive failure by the country’s intelligence apparatus. And they’re right. But this does not mean the U.S. intelligence community (IC) and senior decision-makers did not also miss the mark on understanding Israel’s intelligence capabilities and Hamas’s plans, intentions, and ability to conduct an attack of strategic consequence.

Not every U.S. intelligence failure requires congressional action. But in this case, the geopolitical impact and risks to U.S. interests have proved so severe that Congress should conduct its own independent review. 

In response to Oct. 7, the Israeli government has so far initiated two investigations to examine the failings of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and intelligence services leading up to Oct. 7.

In January, Israel’s state comptroller, Matanyahu Englman, opened an investigation with 33 issues to be examined, including intelligence matters. The title “comptroller” is somewhat misleading—as Englman’s role goes well beyond the oversight of the Israeli government’s financial accounting and expenditures. The Hebrew term “Mevaker HaMedina,” meaning “critic of the state,” more clearly defines the role that Englman holds. The “Mevaker” can examine all Israeli agencies and government records, is independent, is voted in by the Knesset (Israel’s Parliament), and is accountable only to the Knesset.

In February, IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi ordered the IDF to begin a probe into the military and intelligence failures and weaknesses that left the IDF unable to detect and prevent the attack. Members of the committee include veteran Israeli national security leaders, such as former IDF Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz and former Military Intelligence Directorate head Aharon Ze’evi-Farkash. Of note, the appointment of Mofaz—who has criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government for its efforts to overhaul the judiciary—generated condemnation from some right-wing ministers. In addition, both war cabinet minister Benny Gantz and Shin Bet intelligence service chief Ronen Bar have urged Israel’s ministers to establish a state commission of inquiry to examine the attacks, similar to the U.S. Sept. 11 Commission. Israel is prudent to be looking internally to learn lessons so that such an attack can never happen again.

But the U.S. Congress also has a role to play and should establish its own “Mevaker HaMedina” to ensure the intelligence community and policymakers learn the right lessons from this failure. Specifically, among the chief issues to be addressed, Congress should determine whether the IC overestimated Israeli intelligence capabilities and relied too heavily on Israel for Hamas warning intelligence.

Making the Case: A Strategic Israeli and U.S. Intelligence Failure

A cornerstone of the Biden administration’s National Security Strategy is to support allies and partners. However, to do this effectively, the U.S. intelligence community needs to analyze and understand partners’ military and intelligence capabilities. And in the case of Israel, with a history of intelligence lore, the IC might have believed that Israel was more capable than it turned out to be to detect a major Hamas attack. The IC reportedly produced at least two assessments based on intelligence provided by Israel that warned the Biden administration of an increased risk of Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the weeks leading up to the attack. However, according to sources that spoke with CNN, none of the IC assessments “offered any tactical details or indications of the overwhelming scope, scale and sheer brutality of the operation.” This has led some lawmakers to question whether the IC relies too heavily on Israel for intelligence on Hamas.

The U.S. generally provides partner support through security assistance—such as the sale of munitions, tanks, and aircraft. However, the U.S. regularly assists partners through non-materiel support, such as intelligence sharing. These relationships are mutually beneficial. Partners, such as Israel, also provide the U.S. with certain types of threat information—filling critical gaps. A U.S. Central Command official said in response to the Oct. 7 attack, “We have a close partnership with Israel and always share timely intelligence about threats in the region with our partners.”

The Israeli intelligence services have a better understanding of priority threats that are strategic, local, and imminent—such as Hamas—than does the U.S. or other Israeli allies. More U.S. intelligence resources and capabilities are dedicated toward monitoring groups covered, or purportedly covered, by the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF)—such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State—than non-al-Qaeda-affiliated groups like Hamas that have historically posed less of a direct threat to the United States. The expectation, therefore, is that Israel would have better warning intelligence on Hamas to share than the U.S. would have.

However, in the case of the Oct. 7 attack, Israeli officials appeared to have failed to understand and even dismissed the indications and warning (I&W) intelligence that Hamas would execute such a brazen plan. Israeli officials reportedly were aware of the 40-page plan for the Oct. 7 attack, called “Jericho Wall,” for more than a year prior to the attack. The plans were circulated among Israeli military and intelligence leaders, but experts believed Hamas was not capable of carrying them out. Israeli intelligence then failed to recognize indications that the plan in their possession was being executed. Three months before the attack, Israel’s signals intelligence agency warned that Hamas had conducted a training exercise that appeared to resemble the “Jericho Wall” plan. White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said that the U.S. intelligence community did not have access to the Israeli document detailing Hamas’s plan to attack Israel.

The fallout from the attack has directly impacted U.S. national security interests and called into question Israel’s willingness to share certain information. Aside from the proximate deaths and atrocities committed on Oct. 7, the Israel-Hamas war has also created a devastating humanitarian crisis and undermined the stability of the Middle East and global trade. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines recently warned the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) that “the Gaza conflict will have a generational impact on terrorism.” The war appears likely to boost recruitment and inspire terrorist operations against U.S. interests beyond the Middle East, including against the U.S. homeland. FBI Director Christopher Wray said during a congressional hearing in October that the war has “raised the threat of an attack against Americans in the United States to a whole other level.”

Some of this violence has already harmed U.S. service members. In response to the Israel-Hamas war, Iranian-aligned groups have launched hundreds of attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria (including a relatively large-scale attack on a U.S. base in Iraq on Aug. 6), causing scores of injuries and killing three soldiers. The Houthis have already disrupted global shipping for several months, and now the group is threatening to disrupt global communications and internet connectivity by cutting seabed fiber optic cables. Many core national interests are in jeopardy, and the U.S. is still at risk of a hotter proxy war with Iran in Iraq and Syria.

The Israel-Hamas war has also created deep fissures in American society, as manifested across college campuses. Our adversaries—perhaps most prominently Russia—have also taken note and are exploiting the division through overt online propaganda and covert influence.

In addition, although the precise effect on U.S. military preparedness is unclear, supporting Israel during its war effort requires resources of the U.S. defense industrial base that would otherwise be available for use in other strategic environments. Even before Oct. 7, some U.S. intelligence officials suggested China might be emboldened to initiate a conflict with Taiwan given the perception that the U.S. military has diminished resources and a maxed-out defense industrial base that will be challenged in a protracted conflict.

Perhaps with different intelligence priorities and collection focus, senior U.S. political leaders would have been aware of the nature of the Hamas threat and might have been able to inform and convince top Israeli decision-makers of Hamas’s preparations for attack. Even though Israeli officials purportedly dismissed some of their own I&W intelligence as “aspirational,” a phone call from a U.S. president or national security adviser warning that Hamas was in fact preparing for a large-scale, strategic attack would be politically risky to simply ignore. Therefore, Congress should conduct an independent review and examine the intelligence and policymaking activities and decisions leading up to the Oct. 7 attack and determine what, if anything, the U.S. could have done differently to have averted this regional crisis.

A Bipartisan HPSCI-SSCI Joint Inquiry

The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) and the SSCI have jurisdiction over national and military intelligence matters. Congressional oversight includes inquiries into intelligence activities that are wasteful, ineffective, or noncompliant with law or policy. To prevent the inquiry from turning into a political cudgel, the HPSCI and SSCI should co-lead a bipartisan, bicameral inquiry of the intelligence community’s priorities and activities leading up to the Oct. 7 attack.

There are of course inspectors general within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and IC agencies who are independent from their parent organizations. For example, the IC inspector general is responsible for the oversight of  “programs and activities within the responsibility and authority of the Director of National Intelligence.” But the scope of this inquiry should also include examining the President’s Intelligence Priorities and National Security Council decision-making and direction—which likely exceed the inspector general’s limited authority and will need to look beyond IC agencies’ activities and decision-making.

The Senate’s Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2025 includes a requirement for the director of national intelligence to conduct an assessment of the Israel-Hamas war. The provision requires the director to identify “[l]essons learned from the timing and scope of the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas against Israel, including lessons related to United States intelligence cooperation with Israel and other regional partners.” This would be a useful step, but a limited one because the IC would be grading its own work—which brings with it accountability and independence problems.

The IC should also conduct its own internal assessment, but this should not supplant an external, independent review. Only Congress has the independence and oversight authorities to comprehensively and objectively examine the cross-cutting intelligence and policy issues that likely contributed to this failure. Specifically, the joint congressional inquiry should address the following key questions, among others:

1. What was the IC’s assessment of the Israeli intelligence community’s ability to detect Hamas’s preparations for a major attack and willingness to share such information? Was the assessment accurate?
2. Did the IC collect I&W intelligence on Hamas’s attack preparations that could have been shared with Israel before Oct. 7? Was I&W intelligence on Oct. 7 preparations collected but not analyzed or analyzed but lacking rigor? Were I&W products briefed to policymakers and, if so, how were the products received?
3. If IC products indicating a potential Hamas attack existed, were these products discoverable to other appropriately cleared IC members as required per Intelligence Community Directive 501 (ICD 501)? (ICD 501 requires all intelligence produced by the IC to be discoverable by automated means to authorized IC personnel.)
4. Was Hamas prioritized appropriately in the National Intelligence Priority Framework (NIPF) prior to Oct. 7? Should Hamas be reprioritized in the NIPF? (The NIPF lists the president’s national intelligence priorities and provides direction and points of emphasis to the IC.)
5. Did the two successive national security strategies, under the Trump and Biden administrations, which prioritized China and Russia over violent extremist organizations, contribute to under-resourcing of intelligence collection and analysis related to Hamas’s capabilities and intentions?
6. In light of the Hamas attack, what investments in collection, analysis, and other capabilities are necessary to detect preparations for future strategic surprise?
   

Regardless of what a congressional inquiry finds about Israel’s intelligence capabilities, the Oct. 7 attack should motivate Congress to review whether the IC has made accurate assessments of the ability of key U.S. partners to detect future strategic shocks that have global consequences.

Further, HPSCI and SSCI lawmakers need to grapple with the broader issue of whether the IC has pivoted too many intelligence resources and activities from addressing the terrorism threat to supporting the now-dominant frameworks of competing with China and countering Russia. Both parties in Congress have prodded the IC to invest more resources to improve collection and analysis of China and Russia, which may come at the expense of monitoring other threats.

The IC’s allocation of resources toward Beijing has reportedly “required cuts elsewhere, including in [the] counterterrorism” mission set. The question that Congress should answer is not whether the IC should have redirected resources toward priority threats such as China and Russia, but whether the IC has struck the right balance. Congress should determine whether the rebalancing of intelligence priorities and capabilities for near-peer competition contributed to the U.S.’s failure on Oct. 7. Congress should also provide recommendations and require the IC to make adjustments, if necessary.

The events of Oct. 7, the war in Gaza, and regional instability are horrific. For this reason, it is imperative that Congress identify any actions that the IC and policymakers could have taken to have prevented the catastrophic consequences that are now unfolding in order to better prepare the United States to respond to similar threats in the future.

Editor’s Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of Defense, members of Congress, or the U.S. Government.