The Failure of U.S. Intelligence in the lead-up to the Yom Kippur War

Abstract

The term ‘conception’ has so far been associated with the Agranat Committee of Inquiry, which studied Israel’s lack of preparedness for the Yom Kippur War. However, it would seem that Agranat was not the first to use it. The term ‘conception’ was first used by Deputy CIA Director General Daniel Graham, who led a team that conducted a post-mortem analysis on the failure of the U.S. intelligence services to foresee the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, at the behest of William Colby, then head of the CIA.

The conclusions of the inquiry, which were classified ‘top-secret’, were distributed amongst the heads of the U.S. intelligence services in December 1973, some four months before the interim report of the Agranat Committee. They only became available to the general public in June 2010, through the National Security Archive in Washington, DC. This report, together with other documents, shows clearly that the U.S. intelligence community, throughout all its branches, not just the Israeli Intelligence Directorate (Aman), failed in its assessments on the eve of the war – despite the voluminous collected material showing plainly that Egypt and Syria were preparing for an attack.