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States use intelligence to inform their strategic decisions — and to influence their friends. Israel has a long history of passing secret intelligence to the United States in order to win its support, and according to multiple reports, it is trying again. The White House is more likely to join the war against Iran if it accepts Israeli intelligence at face value. But in doing so, it will sacrifice its strategic flexibility and risk losing diplomatic leverage. For a president who cherishes bargaining power, this would be a grave mistake.
History helps shed light on the relationship between intelligence, strategy, and clandestine diplomacy. In 1967, Israeli officials approached the White House in search of material support in advance of the coming war with Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. To make the case, they shared a pessimistic intelligence analysis of the balance of forces and the danger of fighting a Soviet-backed alliance that surrounded Israel on all sides. President Lyndon B. Johnson had offered rhetorical support, but they wanted much more.
Although the administration had reasons to avoid entanglement in a Middle Eastern war, Johnson was sufficiently concerned to ask the CIA for its assessment of the looming conflict. The agency predicted that Israel would win decisively and quickly. Armed with this analysis, Johnson parried Israeli requests. “All of our intelligence people are unanimous that if [Egypt] attacks,” he told the Israeli foreign minister, “you will whip hell out of them.”
The CIA got it right. The famously lopsided war began with an Israeli surprise attack and ended six days later with a comprehensive Israeli victory. Johnson limited military support and avoided U.S. intervention, managing to spare the country from involvement in another war at a time when public opposition to Vietnam was increasing.
A similar story is playing out today. Israeli officials are making ominous statements about Iran’s nuclear capability. Invoking the Holocaust, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that a comprehensive attack on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure was needed to stave off disaster, “We can’t leave these threats for the next generation,” he said, “if we don’t act now, there won’t be a next generation.” And as was the case in 1967, Israel has reportedly shared intelligence on Iranian nuclear research and its progress towards the bomb.
Israeli officials are also trying to reason with Washington: American participation would help prevent Israel’s diplomatic isolation and alleviate concerns about dwindling stockpiles in a potentially protracted war. Further, U.S. airstrikes might be able to target deeply buried targets like Fordo, the Iranian uranium enrichment facilities located under a mountain near the city of Qom. At 30,000 pounds, the U.S. GBU-57 massive ordnance penetrator may be able to damage or destroy the site. Israel does not possess this weapon.
Dueling Assessments
Israel’s argument for U.S. intervention rests on the same claim as Israel’s stated reason for launching the crippling strikes against Iranian military infrastructure and security leadership: that Iran was and perhaps still might be going nuclear. U.S. intelligence agencies disagree. In March, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard reported that Iran was not on the verge of building nuclear weapons, and that there was no indication that Iranian policy had changed. This was consistent with intelligence estimates going back to the George W. Bush administration, which concluded that Iran had shelved its weapons program even though it continued to seek to improve its work along the nuclear fuel cycle. As she told Congress, the intelligence community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader [Ali] Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.” Her summary of intelligence did not ignore other Iranian nuclear work. Indeed, Gabbard noted that norms against discussing nuclear weapons have eroded in Iran, and that its “enriched uranium stockpile is at its highest levels and is unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons.”
Still, the U.S. intelligence community appeared convinced that Iran was not an imminent threat, suggesting that Israeli claims were overwrought. The other implication of U.S. intelligence is that that Israel can handle Iran without U.S. assistance, given that the basic problem is Iranian research that might one day allow it to weaponize its stockpile of fissile material. Israel’s air campaign might not be able to destroy Fordo, but it has clearly done a great deal of damage to Iran’s research infrastructure and the enrichment halls at Natanz. In addition to damaging multiple facilities, Israel has also killed at least 14 nuclear scientists since the war began. Such efforts are likely to delay any future Iranian nuclear efforts. While U.S. and Israeli agencies appear to agree on the substance of current intelligence, they do not share the same assessment. If news reports are correct, then U.S. intelligence seems less concerned.
President Donald Trump, however, does not seem interested in U.S. intelligence. Asked about Gabbard’s statement about Iran’s nuclear program, he dismissed the question: “I don’t care at all about what she said. I think they were very close to having one.” Trump’s casual remark follows a pattern of indifference to U.S. intelligence findings that began in his first term. For all the concerns that Trump would politicize intelligence, he seems more inclined to ignore it. He earned a reputation for neglect during his first term, reducing the frequency of intelligence briefings and disregarding intelligence estimates. His consumer habits seem the same today.
The president is well within his rights to ignore intelligence. Policymakers are under no obligation to pay attention to intelligence. Presidents in particular reserve the right to make decisions based on their own sources of information and insight. But indifference to one’s own intelligence community has serious consequences. Most obviously, it removes a potentially important voice from the policy process. Intelligence agencies control unique sources — providing the kind of granular detail about ongoing conflicts which can help corroborate (or undermine) policymakers’ assumptions. Clear-eyed strategy requires the ability to assess the outcome of military operations. Ignoring intelligence means cutting off the assessors.
Intelligence Among Friends
Good intelligence also helps with wartime diplomacy, which is particularly important in the current conflict. The fact that U.S intelligence has reached different conclusions than Israel is interesting. Policymakers might learn something important about the war by asking why. They might also benefit by using intelligence as a diplomatic tool. Handled with care, intelligence can increase policymakers’ freedom of action, as Johnson illustrated in the Six-Day War. Possession of independent assessments allows policymakers and diplomats to overcome information asymmetries, giving them bargaining leverage. The fact that the CIA bolstered Johnson’s position helped him fend off Israeli overtures. The current conflict is different because Trump already rejected a key intelligence judgment, publicly. But it may be that the administration finds value in using U.S. intelligence to challenge Israeli claims, especially if the president gets cold feet about intervening.
U.S. intelligence, for instance, might suggest the limits of airstrikes on Fordo. It may be that even the most lethal conventional bomb will not be able to do lasting damage to such a deeply buried target. Indeed, there might be reason to believe that a ground operation has a better chance of succeeding, especially given that Israeli air superiority gives it the opportunity to deliver special operations forces directly to the site. The ground option has not received a great deal of attention in public, though it has come up this week. Such an operation would carry real dangers, of course. The nightmare scenario for Israel would be a stranded task force deep in Iran if the mission goes sideways. Yet if Iran’s latent nuclear capabilities are an existential threat, as Netanyahu claims, then Israel should be willing to take extraordinary risks.
In either case, the Trump administration should force the conversation rather than simply accepting Israeli judgements about the best way forward. Evaluating the prospects for military options requires good intelligence — and a willingness among policymakers to pay attention.
Joshua Rovner is associate professor of international relations at American University, and nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. His most recent book is Strategy and Grand Strategy.
Image: U.S. Air Force via Wikimedia Commons
