Intelligence failures happen when pieces of information that should be picked up are not or are picked up and then misinterpreted. If they are interpreted correctly but not acted upon then it becomes more of a policy failure. When Israel was caught out by the Hamas attack of 7 October this was both an intelligence and policy failure. Despite the famed professionalism and tenacity of Israel’s intelligence agencies, they did not notice signs of the coming attack by the Palestinian militants, and despite the equally famed security focus of the government, it was complacent about the situation in Gaza. This was not the first time the country had been caught out, in different circumstances but for similar reasons. Fifty years earlier, on 6 October 1973, Israel was surprised as Egyptian and Syrian forces embarked on a sudden offensive and broke through its defensive lines.
Perhaps still the most fateful and studied example of a successful surprise attack is the Japanese strike against the American Pearl Harbor naval base on 7 December 1941 that opened the Pacific War. In a landmark study, the historian Roberta Wohlstetter introduced the thought that the problem was not a lack of information – the Americans were after all reading Japanese diplomatic and military traffic – but that those bits that in retrospect warned of trouble to come were lost in the background “noise” of masses of material that turned out to be irrelevant.
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