The Israelis were convinced that they would have sufficient warning of an attack to mobilize their reserves. Thanks to General Eli Zeria's breathtaking self-confidence in his own assessments of the intelligence, the Israelis had almost no warning. Then the Israelis were convinced that their superb Air Force would be able to hold the line even if the warning failed. Not so. The SAM missiles that the Soviets had supplied to the Arabs in such abundance meant that the Israelis lost a quarter of their Air Force in the first three days, with little to show for it. The Israeli Air Force commanded the skies over the whole Middle East, except for those two crucial battle zones over the Golan Heights and the Suez Canal.

The Israelis were also convinced that their armored forces were so much higher in quality than the despised Arab foes that their counter-attacks would quickly send any impudent Arab incursions fleeing back to Cairo and Damascus. Again, they had not counted on the Soviet provision of masses of Sagger anti-tank missiles and RPGs to the Arabs, and the Egyptians had been trained under General Shazly's bold and clever plan for a limited invasion to make excellent use of them and to destroy the Israeli tank charges as soon as they came into range. Finally--and this is less a failure of intelligence than of imagination--the Israelis had never expected the Arabs to fight so well, or as bravely as they did.

If Rabinovich's book has a flaw, it lies in the way he rather skates over the issue of whether Israel was by the third day of the war so desperate that it came close to using nuclear weapons. Certainly Defense Minister Moshe Dayan was telling Air Force General Benny Peled to scrap all the careful plans to attack the Egyptian missile system because "the Third Temple is falling." Rabinovich notes that on the morning of October 9, the Israeli general staff recommended taking "extreme measures." But there he leaves it. Media reports that Israeli aircraft were loaded with nukes are simply ignored. He does not deal with the subsequent Cabinet decision to go no further, nor with the suggestion by other authors that Israel simply flirted with the nuclear option in order to convince the U.S. government of the seriousness of its plight. But then this would be intelligence of another kind, the deliberate use of disinformation, rather like the attempts of Generals David Elazar and Haim Bar-Lev to stage a radio conversation in which they described their beating off of an Egyptian armored attack as an Israeli defeat, in the hope of tempting the Egyptians to try again.

Old Lessons, New Students

Intelligence and disinformation are as old as war, and this brings us back to Waterloo. The Duke of Wellington had learned in Portugal and Spain that the way to frustrate the French attacks was to hide the bulk of his troops behind a ridge line, sparing them from the massed bombardments of the excellent French artillery. This had the added advantage of confusing the enemy about his strength and his dispositions. Napoleon made a personal tour of the battlefield, walking dangerously close to the British lines at 2 am on the night before the battle, in order to place his massed artillery to best advantage. But Napoleon still found himself uncertain not only where the British and allied troops were posted in most strength, and above all did not know that the only half-defeated Prussians were plodding through the Belgian countryside to unleash a devastating attack on his right flank and rear. A couple of regiments of the magnificent cavalry that Marshal Ney wasted in fruitless attack on the British squares--if sent out to scout--might have warned Napoleon of the Prussian advance. It was not only

Essay Types: Essay