Intelligence Failures: Some Historical Lessons, Part 2

The first part of this Dossier, in the last issue of The Estimate, tried to offer a context for the US debate over alleged intelligence failures before last September 11. In that issue, several historical parallels — some Middle Eastern, others not — were examined, including the classic “signal versus noise” analysis of Pearl Harbor, failures due to reliance on preconceptions such as the Israeli delays in mobilization on the eve of the October 1973 war, failure to anticipate surprise, such as the unpreparedness of Arab air forces for the Israeli pre-emptive strike of June 5, 1967, and failure to anticipate innovation, including the failures which led to the fall of France in 1940 and the fall of Singapore in 1942.

Some have argued that strategic surprise can never be completely avoided because of the intractable nature of security and surprise, two of the principles of war. One’s intelligence services may seek to penetrate an enemy’s security and anticipate surprise, but one cannot expect to anticipate everything. The last issue noted the distinction between collection and assessment; reports that a National Security Agency intercept made on September 10 referred to action the next day but was not translated until September 12 point to a classic problem: sorting through the “noise” that one finds in any massive collection of raw intelligence. Finding that “signal” amid the noise is not as easy as it seems after the fact. After Pearl Harbor, there were many intercepts and reports of Japanese transmissions which pointed towards what happened, and critics naturally seized upon these, overlooking the many others which seemed to point in other directions.

Similarly, intercepts from Al-Qa’ida were ambiguous; the organization itself maintained considerable operational security and, being a diffuse, non-state actor was even harder to monitor than a state might be.

But there is a different kind of intelligence failure, and some of the major ones of history have fit this category: when the imminence of military conflict is obvious and the basic data on the enemy is known, but his plans are totally misread or incorrectly assessed. To some extent this played a role at Pearl Harbor: by December 6 Washington knew that war was imminent and even had an inkling of the time it would start, but assumed the assault would be against British and Dutch territory in Southeast Asia.

Strictly speaking, once again, this is not an intelligence failure in the collection since: it is a failure of assessment and a failure to anticipate enemy intentions. Some military intelligence professionals like to say that the primary functions of military intelligence are twofold: warning, that is the ability to warn that some military action is imminent, and order of battle, that is, knowing more or less what the enemy’s assets are. Intention is much harder to judge and, some would say, impossible to judge confidently. Yet one function of intelligence must be to correctly read enemy intentions. Otherwise, failures such as those discussed in this second part become inevitable.

As noted in the introduction above, military intelligence is generally better at providing warning (that something is about to happen) and battle order (what the enemy has to work with) than it is at predicting intention. The examples given in this second Dossier on the subject are cases where it was clear that something was about to happen and where at least the general order of battle was known, but for varying reasons the enemy’s tactics and intentions were totally misjudged. If not strategic surprise, then at least tactical surprise, was achieved. Three classic cases are dealt with here: the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the Chinese intervention in Korea in 1950, and Tet 1968. Other historical examples will be mentioned as appropriate.

It should also be noted that each of these attacks remains somewhat controversial. The events of 1990 are too recent for the full intelligence story to have yet been told. The Chinese assault of 1950 is, to this day, interpreted differently depending on one’s historical judgment of the generalship of Douglas MacArthur. And if many historians have come to some agreement on the Tet offensive of 1968, it should be noted that the Central Intelligence Agency and US Army historians still see those events in dramatically different lights. What follows is an interpretation, for purposes of analogy with the debate over September 11, and is not intended as a final version of debates which are still open.

Iraq and Kuwait, 1990
The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August of 1990 caught most intelligence services — Western, Arab and Israeli — off guard. And yet, Iraqi force movements were not a mystery, and Iraq had been increasingly threatening in its demands toward Kuwait. Iraq’s major economic problems in the year after the war with Iran ended in 1988 were much analyzed and understood. Its military capabilities, much studied during the eight year war with Iran, were well understood, as were its doctrine and training.

Nor was warning a problem. Published memoirs and reports indicate that as early as July 17 — more than two weeks before the August 2 invasion — major Iraqi military deployments had been detected by the United States, and that within two days of that the basic battle order of the buildup was understood. By July 23 the US Defense Intelligence Agency was conducting twice-a-day briefings, and by July 25 massive increases in the Iraqi deployments were detected. Even civilian visitors to Iraq were reporting major movements southwards over a week before the attack.

Both warning and battle order issues seem to have been in order. So why were most intelligence services surprised by the August 2 invasion?

Because much of the material is still classified, and there has been much debate on the subject, it is a bit difficult to fully evaluate the real situation on the eve of the invasion. But a few things seem clear.

First, the US was somewhat diverted in its attention. The Berlin Wall had come down the year before, and the Soviet Bloc had begun to implode; the Soviet Union itself was on its way to disintegration. Second, Iraq had never been pro-Western — despite the mythology, US support in the Iran-Iraq war had been limited and cautious — but some in the West had come to see Iraq as the lesser of two evils. And third: well, third, nobody thought an Arab country would actually try to occupy and conquer another, because it had never happened, at least never successfully.

Iraqi defenders have argued that the US somehow encouraged the Iraqis — conspiracy theorists would argue, enticed them — by Ambassador April Glaspie’s statement that the US took no positions on inter-Arab boundary disputes. But Iraq had long ago, formally at least, abandoned its claim to all of Kuwait; most analysts assumed that at most Iraq would seek to take the disputed islands of Warba and Bubiyan — which, in fact, controlled access to the Iraqi naval base of Umm al-Qasr — or perhaps seek to move into the Rumayla oilfield, where the Iraqis claimed Kuwait was actually drilling into an Iraqi field.

In short, it seems likely that the West expected Saddam to be either 1) bluffing, hoping to make the Kuwatis, who were notoriously cautious and unable to defend themselves, make concessions; or 2) planning to seize Warba, Bubiyan, or at most an oilfield or two and then go to the negotiating table.

No one, in short, really thought the Iraqis were going to conquer all of Kuwait, despite the massive military deployments. Was this a problem of preconceptions — the conceptsia that Israelis blamed for the 1973 surprise — or a case of wishful thinking?

History will have to sort out the actual mistakes made, but Ambassador Glaspie’s remarks, so often cited as “encouraging” the Iraqis, were neither entirely her own (she was following State Department guidance) nor really that misleading: the US did not have a position on Warba and Bubiyan. But it — and Iraq — recognized Kuwait as a sovereign state, and therefore, it was a reasonable assumption that the statement was not giving a green light to the conquest of Kuwait.

There were few mysteries about the Iraqi buildup; none about the Iraqi order of battle; and warning was clear. What was unclear was what Iraq intended. Was it a bluff? Or a plan to move into the disputed islands and therefore force negotiations (a move many Arab and Western states would not have found such a threat): or was it what it proved to be, an invasion?

So far as is known to date, despite full knowledge of Iraq deployments and battle order, no major intelligence service properly predicted what happened. Warning and battle order were in place; intention was misread.

Korea, November 1950
What happened in Korea in November of 1950 remains highly controversial. It is also not as pure a case of warning and battle order being known but intention being misread, because there were fundamental misjudgments of battle order. But a complete misreading of both how Chinese armies fought, and what their intentions were, made for disaster, despite a foreknowledge that Chinese forces had entered Korea and were already engaging US and UN forces.

The contrasts also made for high drama. The first year of the Korean War saw more shifts of fortune than any other year of any war in modern times: the drama of Europe in 1940-41, or Asia in 1941-42, was greater, but there were not the stunning reversals of fate which made 1950 so bizarre in Korea. Oddly, it is a largely forgotten war.

After the first combats between US and Chinese forces, US Eighth Army Commander Walton Walker remarked that though Chinese had been encountered, this did not mean that China had intervened in force, because “after all, there are lots of Mexicans in Texas.” But the Chinese he was fighting were not ethnic Chinese in Korea, they were core troops of the 600,000-strong Fourth Field Army of the People’s Liberation Army, led by Lin Biao (Lin Piao), the man who would one day become Mao Zedong’s anointed heir, until he fell out with Mao.

In late October of 1950, United Nations Commander Gen. Douglas MacArthur was at the top of his game. Earlier in the year, North Korea’s invasion of the South had driven US forces back into a beachhead around Pusan. MacArthur boldly landed forces at Inchon, behind North Korean lines, recaptured Seoul and drove deep into North Korea. With the North Korean state virtually destroyed and its army in disarray, MacArthur ordered the two wings of his command, based around the US Eighth Army and X Corps, to advance to the Yalu River which formed the Korean-Chinese border. But just as the advance got under way, US and South Korean forces encountered Chinese main force units for the first time in late October.

In terms of warning, the presence of Chinese south of the Yalu was clearly known; in terms of battle order, some US estimates spoke of as many as 200,000 Chinese inside Korea. The presence had been detected; the intervention was known.

Then the Chinese disappeared.

The Chinese maintained remarkable troop discipline, moving only at night, remaining in village buildings during the day, with troops under orders to freeze absolutely still if an aircraft passed over. While US and UN offiicials debated whether the Chinese forces had withdrawn, or had merely been creating a buffer zone along the Yalu, several Chinese Armies (corps-sized formations) were infiltrating around and behind UN lines, and in the 60-air-mile-wide mountainous gap between the right and left wings of the UN Armies.

Once again, in terms of warning, the presence of Chinese forces was known. In terms of battle order, the US underestimated the actual count, but knew that substantial forces were present. What the commanders failed to understand was the intent of the enemy, and its particular capabilities. What MacArthur was to say of the Chinese intervention — “we face an entirely new war” — was quite accurate, for the North Korean People’s Army had been a Soviet-built, and Soviet-style, armor-heavy and artillery-heavy Army. The Chinese People’s Liberation Army, on the other hand, was another type of force altogether: light, mobile, only a decade and a half past the Long March and less than that since the Caves of Yan’an. It fought differently, and it knew how to disappear from sight. Its methods were still little understood in the West.

When the trap was sprung on November 26, the US faced its biggest tactical surprise since the Ardennes in 1944, the two wings of its Army split apart by enemy forces which threatened to envelop them. The disaster of November-December 1950 was profound; the US was rolled back down the Korean peninsula and Seoul changed hands yet again. There were fears that allied forces would be driven off the peninsula altogether. That did not occur, and the war was turned around yet again, and stabilized until an armistice ended the war with Korea still divided. But the stunning surprise of November 1950 undercut the triumph of Inchon, and was one of the greatest surprises ever inflicted on US arms.

Tet, February 1968
Tet 1968 fits the pattern we have been examining. US intelligence knew that an enemy offensive was coming, knew approximately when, and had reasonably accurate information about enemy battle order. But it completely misread how the enemy intended to fight that offensive, and where.

That an offensive was coming was known. Several North Vietnamese divisions were already besieging the US base at Khe Sanh in northern South Vietnam. Although the Central Intelligence Agency and the Military Assistance Command-Vietnam (MACV, the US command in Saigon) disagreed about how to count enemy battle order (the CIA always argued for higher figures than MACV considered politically acceptable), the basic forces arrayed against the US and South Vietnamese forces were fairly well identified.

What the US expected, however, was a coordinated attack in the norhtern provinces of Vietnam, in the Central Highlands, and perhaps around Saigon. The Viet Cong were best at guerrilla operations in the peripheral hinterlands, and regular North Vietnamese troops appeared to be concentrating in the north.

In conventional military terms, such an offensive made more sense than the one which was in fact about to occur. General Vo Nguyen Giap, the theorist behind the Vietnam war, followed the Maoist doctrine of People’s War, and envisioned a stage in revolutionary war known as “General Offensive/General Uprising”. Tet was the general offensive, which, by attacking everywhere at once and risking much on the gamble, it was hoped to collapse the morale of the US and especially South Vietnamese troops, and bring about the conditions for a general uprising which would sweep the revolution to victory.

At the end of January 1968, Vietcong forces attacked in most of the provinces and most of the major cities of South Vietnam, including a suicide attack that breached the walls of the American Embassy in Saigon. The highly symbolic old imperial capital of Hue was occupied for weeks and had to be recovered with house-to-house fighting.

There was no general uprising, and the US gradually recovered the ground lost. The Viet Cong were virtually destroyed as a fighting force (thereafter, regular North Vietnamese units did more of the fighting). In military terms, the US and South Vietnamese won the Tet battles, and Giap’s general uprising did not happen. (It never did, of course: in the end North Vietnam conquered Saigon the old-fashioned way with regular forces.)

But Tet was a major intelligence failure and, because of that failure, it was perceived in the West as a defeat. It was the moment when much of the US public and press began to doubt seriously that the war could be won. Soon after, Lyndon B. Johnson announced he would not run again for President. The credibility of US claims never recovered, and only decades later has it become clearer that Tet was a military failure for the other side. But the intelligence surprise was the key to the perception that the US was suddenly losing the war. And that intelligence failure came not because no one foresaw an offensive or misjudged the numbers involved, but because the targets attacked were so much more numerous and central than expected.

Strategic surprise can never be eliminated, and intelligence failures will occur. But once again, the problems is most often one of assessment and understanding intent, not of collection. September 11 clearly included some missed signals, but the intelligence failure does not seem, in fact, to have been as profoundly misguided as some of those examined in this two-part Dossier.

Home

Current Issue

About Us

Back Issues

Resources

Subscribe