The Watchman Fell Asleep: The Surprise of Yom Kippur and Its Sources (review)

The surprise attack launched by Egypt and Syria on the afternoon of Yom Kippur, 6 October 1973, was the most traumatic event in Israel's history. A great deal has been written about this war, but much of value is available only in Hebrew. We are therefore indebted to the noted Israeli scholar Uri Bar-Joseph for this excellent English-language translation of his landmark study, first published in 2001.

The author surveys the plethora of well-argued theories about the nature of surprise and intelligence failures that capture some of the truth, but he zeroes in on two individuals he views as most directly responsible for Israel's inability to recognize the impending attack until it was too late. One is the man singled out by the postwar Agranat Commission for a major share of the blame, Maj. Gen. Elieu Zeira, the Director of Military Intelligence (AMAN). Zeira was convinced that Egypt and Syria could not and therefore would not challenge Israel militarily, and he forcefully projected optimism at the highest levels of the government long after contrary facts should have eroded this belief. His chief disciple was Lt. Col. Yona Bandman, head of the Egypt Branch in AMAN's Research Division. The influence of Zeira and Bandman was decisive because within Israel's relatively small intelligence community, only AMAN did analysis; everyone else, including the Mossad (Foreign Intelligence Service), was in the collection business. AMAN therefore had sole responsibility for providing "national intelligence estimates" to the military and political leadership.

Bar-Joseph focuses on what the Agranat Commission identified as the "conception," a set of assumptions shared by nearly all involved parties within the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and the national leadership. The "conception" held that neither Egypt nor Syria would go to war without the means to neutralize the Israeli Air Force (IAF). The only suitable means, the Israelis reasoned, were long-range aircraft and missiles, which Egypt and Syria did not possess in significant numbers. It had not escaped notice that these two countries had procured large quantities of advanced air defense hardware from the U.S.S.R., but the Israeli military leadership was confident in the ability of the IAF to overcome a Soviet-style air defense system. The key error of the "conception" was the Israelis' projection of this assumption on their adversaries, when in fact both Arab countries based their war plans on the ability of their air defense assets to keep the IAF at bay. Bar-Joseph meticulously catalogs the steadily accumulating evidence of an impending attack that somehow failed to generate a viable alternative to the "conception" within Israel and magnified the impact of disinformation and the deceptive measures employed by its adversaries.

A frustrating issue for readers is the matter of AMAN's "special collection means," regarded as the most reliable source of intelligence about an imminent attack. The author does not identify what the special collection means were, but as this system belonged to AMAN instead of the Mossad it was technical in nature; it may have been a particularly well-placed and highly vulnerable SIGINT collection platform. In any event, Maj. Gen. Zeira did not activate the special collection means until the early morning hours of 6 October. He compounded this error by lying repeatedly to his immediate superior, IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. David Elazar, who assumed as early as 2 October that all available intelligence collection assets were in play. Because Elazar and other key decision makers utterly trusted the special means and were not hearing anything alarming from this source, there was no reason to press for an early mobilization.

Employing a chronological approach, Bar-Joseph exhaustively documents how information reaching AMAN that threatened the "conception" was suppressed or downplayed. Late on 4 October the Israeli Air Force carried out a successful photoreconnaissance mission over...