Mossad head: We need spies, not just electronics

JERUSALEM (September 25) - In a rare public appearance, Mossad head Ephraim Halevy last night criticized Western intelligence agencies for neglecting human intelligence in favor of sophisticated electronic methods of spying.

"What needs to be done is to find out what went wrong, not who went wrong," Halevy told a conference on "Intelligence and Peace in the Middle East."

Halevy said the main thing to learn is to revive the use of human elements, agents, as central intelligence sources.

He said that "sigint" or signal intelligence - the collection of intelligence through eavesdropping, spy satellites, and other electronic means - had become the leading way to gather information.

"Sigint had become the central role in intelligence," Halevy said. "For years, we have seen the centrality of the National Security Agency in the American intelligence community.

"Sigint is not only the main supplier of significant information, but it is the scale by which the contributions of other fundamental disciplines are measured. Sigint turned into the ultimate judge of reality, and the power of the other disciplines are used to confirm, cross-reference, and supplement."

Halevy said that nowhere in the world is sigint used to confirm intelligence gathered by non-sigint methods.

"Sigint had become the high priest of intelligence and... blinded those deciphering the signs."

He said that the enemy naturally identified this as the Achilles's heel of Western intelligence and behaved accordingly.

He said the problem wasn't the fact that non-sigint disciplines suffered from less funding.

"Rather it was a state of mind," Halevy said. "Many good people, let me say all of us, including the man speaking to you now, stuck to this basic intelligence concept which led to failures which we urgently need to be aware of. Time is running out and the matter is urgent, very urgent."

Since the September 11 terrorist attacks in the US, many analysts have said that intelligence agencies have failed because human intelligence had been pushed aside. But Halevy's comments were the first made in public by the head of a major intelligence organization.

"The events of the past weeks have impressed on me the need to change the words of failure to those of praise for the intelligence community. The lone agent, who was the sole intelligence component in biblical times, is a central component in the intelligence mosaic of the 21st century. His exclusivity has long disappeared and he is just one of the many competitors grasping for the ear of the researcher, the leaders. In the past years, he has been sidelined.

"These past days have shown us that he is vital just as he had been vital in the course of human history. In other words, marketing is the name of the game. It's good that we have people with capabilities and virtues which answer the needs of the time and which can meet the challenges of the year."

The conference, sponsored by Bar-Ilan University's BESA Center for Strategic Studies and the Center for Special Studies, was held in memory of Eliahu Ben-Elissar, the former MK, diplomat, and Mossad agent who died last summer in Paris where he was serving as ambassador.