Old-fashioned intelligence gathering keyed its success.THERE WAS A TIME many years ago that I’d drive past a soccer stadium in South Vietnam looking for a chalk scratch on the wall. Horizontal meant that my net of spies had reports for me. Posing as farmers, rice peddlers and the like, my spies eyeballed and engaged communist soldiers and units and reported back the essentials: names, numbers, weapons, uniforms, morale and so forth.
This was
old-timey military espionage for sure, a legacy of the OSS and its allied spy
services in World War Two, who depended on agents in the French
underground and elsewhere to track and subvert the Nazis. By the end of the
century, though, advances in technology had eclipsed much of battlefield
HUMINT, as human-based spying efforts are called. In the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, U.S. field commanders increasingly came to favor electronic
intercepts and “overhead”—eavesdropping spy planes, satellites and eventually
drones—to locate the enemy and suss out its plans. HUMINT was just too hard,
too time-consuming and too unreliable against the likes of Al Qaeda, ISIS and
the Taliban. Better to just trace the insurgents’ cell phone calls.
Two weeks
ago, however, Hamas put old-timey intelligence methods to good use against
the Israelis. Documents taken from the bodies of its savage raiders showed they
had carried “detailed maps of the towns and military bases that they targeted.
Some also carried tactical guides identifying weak spots on Israeli army
armored vehicles,” the Wall Street Journal reported. Other captured
documents showed that “Hamas had been systematically gathering intelligence on
each kibbutz bordering Gaza and creating specific plans of attack for each
village that included the intentional targeting of women and children,”
according to NBC News. "The dental office, the supermarket, the
dining hall," an amazed Israel Defense Forces source told NBC. "The
level of specificity would cause anyone in the intelligence field's jaw to
drop."
That source
had to have been born yesterday, so to speak—and/or arrogant to the point of
incompetence, evidently unable to comprehend that the benighted Palestinian
militants couldn't possibly mount the kind of spy ops that Israeli intelligence
had practiced against them for decades.
Back to the
Future
As it turns
out, Hamas had advanced intelligence capabilities that have generally gone
unrecognized. Years ago it had “established electronic warfare units that
sought to neutralize Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system and disrupt IDF
communications,” an Israeli think tank reported in 2021. To that end, it had a
“server farm” of “hundreds or thousands of computers” running around the clock,
the Jerusalem Center for Public
Affairs reported.
Brigadier
Gen. Nati Cohen, former chief of the IDF’s C4I (command, control,
communications, computers, and intelligence) unit, was quoted as saying that
“Hamas sought to disrupt the IDF’s cybernetic superiority and established elite
units for that purpose.” In May 2021, the IDF targeted at least 10 Hamas C4I
and electronic warfare targets, the center said. It didn’t say whether it was
able to obliterate the “server farms.” Whatever, Hamas engineers have not
been able to neutralize Israeli air defenses.
But none of
that explains how Hamas was able to equip its fighters with detailed maps,
right down to the layouts and manpower of Israeli police stations and the
location of safe rooms in kibbutzim homes.
That could
only come from old fashioned HUMINT—eyes and ears (and cell phone cameras, no
doubt) inside those settlements. Israel’s sophisticated surveillance cameras
along the Gaza border were useless in detecting them.
Worker
Spies
In 2022,
Jerusalem authorities issued some 17,000 permits for Palestinians in Gaza to
work in Israel, The Guardian reported last January. “Most
were given to married men over the age of 25 to work in agriculture and
construction,” it said. The permits, of course, provided Hamas with a
potential army of spies to float in and around the Jewish settlements, not to
mention IDF units and tanks.
No doubt a
number of Palestinians were eager to enlist in the espionage corps, but many
others, including—or particularly—those who had forged friendships with their
more ecumenically minded Jewish hosts could well have been threatened with harm
to their families if they refused.
At the end
of their works shifts in Israel their Hamas case officers would have debriefed
them, extracting details on their targets: names, numbers, weapons,
uniforms, morale and so forth, just like I had in Vietnam decades back. The
reports I provided U.S. Marine units in my area enabled them to disrupt
communist attacks. Israeli counterterrorism units, likewise, have planted
many a spy in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
Still,
Hamas shocked Israel with the depth and expertise of its murderous campaign.
Likewise, despite ubiquitous and overlapping U.S. intelligence efforts, the
Vietnamese communists surprised U.S. commanders again and again, no more so
than in January 1968, when they unleashed their legendary Tết holiday attacks on Saigon and provincial
capitals across South Vietnam. In the end, Tết was a tactical disaster for
the communists—U.S. and Saigon troops decimated the insurgents—but a monumental
psychological victory, which served to bely the American command’s stated
optimism about the war’s progress and cratering fragile U.S. domestic support
for it.
It remains
to be seen whether Hamas is having its own Tết. U.S. backing for Israel
is rock solid, President Biden has said again and again. “So, in this moment,
we must be crystal clear,” he said at the White House on Oct. 10, three days
after the attacks. “We stand with Israel. We stand with Israel And we
will make sure Israel has what it needs to take care of its citizens, defend
itself, and respond to this attack.”
And that
stance is reflected in U.S. opinion polls.—with caveats.
“At this
point, more Americans, but not a majority, think Israel's response has been
appropriate, though an overwhelming number of respondents are worried the war
will spill over into a broader regional conflict,” NPR reported last weekend,
citing the latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll.
Hamas is no
Viet Cong, which is to say, it enjoys a fraction of the respect, even
enthusiasm, that many Western elites showered on the Vietnamese revolutionaries
over their decades of struggle to oust the French and then the U.S., which had
propped up a succession of corrupt Saigon regimes with ruthless free-fire
zones, napalm and carpet bombing.
Following
its barbaric slaughter of Israeli innocents, Hamas has even less claim on the
West’s sympathy, even on the hearts of those who have supported Palestinian
rights to statehood. Pro-Hamas protests here have largely been confined to
liberal universities.
Shifting
Sands
But
Israel’s next steps could dramatically alter that equation. Already, Arab
capitals are beset by seething popular support for Hamas, no matter—or
even because of— its slaughter of Jews. Iran and its proxies in Syria and
Lebanon are no doubt sorely tempted to intervene, especially if an Israeli
invasion of Gaza gets bogged down while killing thousands of innocent
Palestinians. There is mounting fear that Muslim militants in Europe, Africa
and the U.S. may well join the fray with more terrorist attacks on local Jewish
targets. Innocent Muslims here, too, have been victimized. Mutual fears and
loathing are ascendent.
Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ultra-nationalist regime, meanwhile, was
already held in contempt by the majority of Israelis, not to mention much of
the world, before the Hamas attacks. Its pathetically
weak response to the Oct. 7 attacks and beyond has served only to deepen
popular disdain for the regime. Support for its national unity government
is fragile, and could deteriorate, depending on what happens next.
The Middle
East is wobbling on its axis. And for that, Hamas’s old-fashioned spymasters
can take credit.
https://www.spytalk.co/p/the-spies-of-hamas