What the Dog Saw [108]
There is no such thing as a perfect intelligence system, and every seeming improvement involves a trade-off. A couple of months ago, for example, a suspect in custody in Canada, who was wanted in New York on forgery charges, gave police the names and photographs of five Arab immigrants, who he said had crossed the border into the United States. The FBI put out an alert on December 29, posting the names and photographs on its website, in the “war on terrorism” section. Even President Bush joined in, saying, “We need to know why they have been smuggled into the country, what they’re doing in the country.” As it turned out, the suspect in Canada had made the story up. Afterward, an FBI official said that the agency circulated the photographs in order to “err on the side of caution.” Our intelligence services today are highly sensitive. But this kind of sensitivity is not without its costs. As the political scientist Richard K. Betts wrote in his essay “Analysis, War, and Decision: Why Intelligence Failures Are Inevitable,” “Making warning systems more sensitive reduces the risk of surprise, but increases the number of false alarms, which in turn reduces sensitivity.” When we run out and buy duct tape to seal our windows against chemical attack, and nothing happens, and when the government’s warning light is orange for weeks on end, and nothing happens, we soon begin to doubt every warning that comes our way. Why was the Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor so unresponsive to signs of an impending Japanese attack? Because, in the week before December 7, 1941, they had checked out seven reports of Japanese submarines in the area — and all seven were false. Rosenhan’s psychiatrists used to miss the sane; then they started to see sane people everywhere. That is a change, but it is not exactly progress.
5.
In the wake of the Yom Kippur War, the Israeli government appointed a special investigative commission, and one of the witnesses called was Major General Zeira, the head of Aman. Why, they asked, had he insisted that war was not imminent? His answer was simple:
The Chief of Staff has to make decisions, and his decisions must be clear. The best support that the head of Aman can give the Chief of Staff is to give a clear and unambiguous estimate, provided that it is done in an objective fashion. To be sure, the clearer and sharper the estimate, the clearer and sharper the mistake — but this is a professional hazard for the head of Aman.
The historians Eliot A. Cohen and John Gooch, in their book Military Misfortunes, argue that it was Zeira’s certainty that had proved fatal: “The culpable failure of Aman’s leaders in September and October 1973 lay not in their belief that Egypt would not attack but in their supreme confidence, which dazzled decision-makers. . . . Rather than impress upon the prime minister, the chief of staff and the minister of defense the ambiguity of the situation, they insisted — until the last day — that there would be no war, period.”
But, of course, Zeira gave an unambiguous answer to the question of war because that is what politicians and the public demanded of him. No one wants ambiguity. Today, the FBI gives us color-coded warnings and speaks of increased chatter among terrorist operatives, and the information is infuriating to us because it is so vague. What does increased chatter mean? We want a prediction. We want to believe that the intentions of our enemies are a puzzle that intelligence services can piece together, so that a clear story emerges. But there rarely is a clear story — at least, not until afterward, when some