Conscious Action and Intelligence Failure

Abstract

The most famous intelligence mission in biblical times failed be cause actors made conscious decisions to deliberately distort the information they passed on to their superiors. The 12 spies that Moses sent to the land of Canaan concluded unanimously that the land was good. But estimates by 10 of them that the enemy was too strong and popular pressure by the Israelites who wanted to avoid the risk of fighting stronger enemy led the 10 spies to consciously change their assessment, from land that floweth with milk and honey to a land that eateth up the inhabitants thereof.1 This biblical precedent has been lost among contemporary intelligence analysts, who have traditionally given insufficient attention to the role of de liberate distortion as source of intelligence failure. Influenced by Roberta Wohlstetter's classic study of the American failure to anticipate the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, by the increasing emphasis in political psychology on motivated and unmotivated biases, and by the literature on bureaucratic poli tics and organizational processes, students of intelligence failure have em phasized some combination of noisy and uncertain threat environment, unconscious psychological biases deriving from cognitive mindsets and emo tional needs, institutional constraints based on bureaucratic politics and orga nizational processes, and strategic deception by the adversary.2