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April 2, 2004/Nisan 11 5764, Vol. 56, No. 28
Intelligence service under scrutiny
DAN BARON
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
JERUSALEM - Israel's foreign intelligence services have come under public scrutiny with revelations they overestimated one major threat while underplaying another.
Hot on the heels of the testimony of former U.S. counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke accusing the Bush administration of ignoring pre-Sept. 11 U.S. intelligence reports because it was focused on Iraq, the Steinitz Report issued on March 28 blasted those in Israel who had pushed for the war on Iraq.
The 80-page report, compiled by the Knesset Subcommittee on Secret Services under lawmaker Yuval Steinitz, lambasted prewar assess-ments by Mossad and military intelligence officials that it was "very likely" Saddam Hussein had missiles with non-conventional payloads aimed at Israel.
That perceived threat prompted the Defense Ministry to issue millions of gas masks and order citizens to prepare sealed rooms, at a cost of millions of dollars.
"The military and political upper echelons are responsible for the mess-up," said the Steinitz Report.
The report also said Mossad and military intelligence officials are in need of a major overhaul after they failed to track Libya's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.
"The idea that a hostile nation like Libya, with an unpredictable leader like Gaddafi, was in the running to develop a militarized nuclear industry, without Israel getting the necessary advance warning from its intelligence service to act preventively or at least prepare accordingly, is - to put it mildly - intolerable," the report said.
Israel stayed on the sidelines of the Iraq war out of concerns its involvement would alienate the few U.S. allies in the Arab world.
But Israeli intelligence assessments were regularly fed to Washington.
Yet asked by reporters if Israeli intelligence might have misled the United States and its ally Britain as to Iraq's real capabilities, Steinitz was more circumspect.
"American and British intelligence services had much better access to Iraq by simply sitting in Kuwait and other locations, and by being able to fly almost freely over Iraqi soil,'' he said.
U.S. and British officials did not comment.
The Steinitz report did not recommend action against any specific intelligence officials. But it said military intelli-gence, which has swollen steadily in terms of manpower and funding since Israel's failure to foresee the Arab assault which opened the 1973 Yom Kippur War, should be cut down in size.
Meanwhile, it called for the Mossad to be boosted. According to security sources, the spy agency has fallen into lethargy recently through a combination of military intelligence's wide reach and an over-reliance on cooperation with foreign agencies.
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