Ordinary Nothing

There’s a lot of merriment, and many a chuckle, about the very unhelpful assessment presented by the Israeli chief of Military Intelligence (BTW, as a totally unrelated side note, but from personal experience, it is an oxymoron usually) about the health of Yasser Arafat.



Like this article:

Israel’s chief of military intelligence, Maj. Gen. Aharon Zeevi-Farkash, did little to clear things up. He told a Cabinet meeting Sunday that Arafat’s “situation is between full recovery and death,” said an Israeli official who briefed reporters on the meeting.

Or this one:

“According to our intelligence assessment, Arafat’s chances of recovery range between full recovery and death. All options are open, General Aaaron Zeevi said in a Sunday briefing on the ailing Palestinian leader’s health.

His comments were greeted on Monday with derisory headlines, with the top-selling Yediot Aharonot newspaper declaring: “They haven’t a clue”.

“With all due respect, we don’t need an IDF (army) intelligence branch director for that,” one unnamed minister said after the meeting.

But here’s the thing. It’s not as silly as it sounds. I mean, of course it’s not very informative. And of course you don’t need a full fledged intelligence branch to get this answer. But so what?

That’s the answer he had to give. I’m certain he didn’t volunteer the info of his own accord. He didn’t came over saying “Listen ye’all, we have just gotten some new and very important news!” and then went on with that statement.

Rather, he was specifically asked to give an assessment about the chances of recovery. Not being able to provide any exact assessment, but being forced to provide some answer, he said what he could. He could have said “We don’t know”, or he could have stated that all the options are possible. He chose the latter. It’s not that bad. A tad ass-covering I-did-provide-for-all-the-possibilities one, but a legitimate answer all the same.



Making that statement was not a problem.



Was not having a good assessment a problem? Maybe, but maybe not. There are actually several options here.



The first, and the obvious one, is that he didn’t know. If he didn’t, and was supposed to, then it’s a problem. But was he supposed to? Was it so expected that he, that our intelligence branch, know this, that not knowing it is a reason for ridicule?

Consider that the amount of people who had actual certain knowledge about the exact condition of Arafat was extremely small, if at all. It’s possible even the doctors didn’t know. Even if they did, the list was then limited to a very small percentage of the hospital personal. And possibly a few high ranking Palestinian officials who were notified. Not a lot of people, and not a lot of places to get the info. It’s not rational to expect an intelligence service to be able to very quickly gain that information. So if they didn’t, that’s nothing to deride them about.

Then there is the other option. That he did know. Assume the Israeli intelligence branch has managed to get exact details about the condition of Arafat. Details which are known to very few people, are written in very few places, and were transmitted on very few channels. Should he actually admit that?



When you get right down to classification of information, there are two things which are really secret, all the rest is people having fun playing cloak and dagger games. The important things are Capabilities and Sources.

You don’t expose a source, because if someone notices, you’ll lose it.

You don’t expose a capability (where applicable, obviously this is not usually a HumInt issue, but quite a serious SigInt one), because then you’ll lose all sources that rely on the capability.

If he provided the information, then it would have been easy to deduce we obtained it (genius level reasoning, surely). If we obtained it, we obtained it from someplace. And there was a very small number of places to get it from. Ergo, providing the detail would have nearly certainly burnt a source (An agent in the hospital? Someone high up on the Palestinian hierarchy? A microphone at a strategic office?) or exposed a capability (Tapping to the phone lines / satellite channel / whatever it was the information was relayed from the hospital on). You don’t do that. He didn’t.

And the beauty is that no one can be sure he’s actually protecting anything, since it’s even more possible he really didn’t know.



Claims that he shouldn’t have secrets from government and ministers are of course silly. You can see how what he reported did come out nice-’n-quick to the media, right? There’s no reason whatsoever to assume that exact information would have been kept secret.



So either he didn’t know, in which case the response was honest and legitimate, or he did know, in which case the response was necessary and legitimate.

I don’t see the problem here.



Unless someone just takes for granted that Israeli intelligence branch is so good, that we have to know everything anyway without anyone having a chance of finding out why. If you accept that premise, then indeed there was no point to keep a secret, so he really didn’t know, and no tknowing it’s so unlikely that it surely indicates someone have majorly screwed up… Personally, I can assure everyone that we are not that good. Nobody is.



So there.

November 2nd, 2004 at 0:23 EET | Categories: Current Affairs | Track comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.