error began with a basic concept that the Arabs would not attack during the next two to three years, and every new development was adopted to this concept.”40

We really had all the clues we needed but all these indicators were dismissed as Arab hyperbole

A friend had told him that Egyptair, the national airline, was moving all of its aircraft from Cairo to Libya on October 5.

The Israelis even intercepted a phone call involving the Iraqi ambassador in Moscow, who was close to the Soviet leadership, in which he reported that the Soviets were evacuating because they expected an imminent Egyptian-Syrian attack on Israel.34

Assad was the more forthcoming and informative. On the 5th, Soviet transport aircraft—including giant AN-22s—began evacuating the dependents of Soviet diplomats and advisors from Egypt and Syria. Sadat would later bitterly complain that the Soviet evacuation betrayed a “total lack of confidence in us and our fighting ability.”3

IAF imagery of the Golan presented a frightening picture, especially compared to the May war scare. Now 850 tanks were forward deployed (compared to only 250 six months before) and 31 SAM batteries were deployed (compared to 2 in May).

Shalev explained the Egyptian build-up as an exercise, reminded the prime minister that the DMI had been right in May, and again judged the risk of war as “low.”

Egypt began a major exercise on the canal. Code named Tahrir 41, the exercise was reported in the Egyptian press to begin on October 1 and end on the 7th.

He also chose not to activate some highly sensitive Israeli signals intelligence collection systems that might have provided more intelligence.

On September 30th, the CIA passed a report to the Israelis sourced from King Hussein which was an elaboration on what he had already told the prime minister.

Sadat was expanding the battlefield to the oil weapon.24

For 48 hours, Syrian Defense Minister Mustafa Tlas and Egyptian Chief of Staff Saad al Shazly held secret discussions at a former royal palace on the sea to agree on the plan of attack and tentatively set D-Day for early October.

In August, the Soviets provided Egypt with a Scud brigade with several dozen missiles capable of reaching Tel Aviv.

But when the Egyptian exercise ended in May, many of the artillery units and the bridging equipment for crossing the canal stayed in their forward positions instead of returning to garrison.

adding that Algerian and Libyan aircraft were deploying to Egypt to support an attack. These were exactly the type of longer-range aircraft Sadat had long wanted.

In April 1973, Marwan alerted his Mossad case officer in London with a flash message that included the code word signaling that war was imminent.

The Russians would have to provide both the aircraft and the Scuds before Sadat would go to war.

he Egyptian proved his bona fides by providing scores of documents from the most sensitive parts of the Egyptian national security bureaucracy, including a complete order of battle of the Egyptian military and the detailed plans for Operation Badr.18

and second, Egypt could blunt Israeli air superiority.

The IAF—using manned and unmanned aircraft (it was already pioneering the world in the use of drones to collect intelligence in 1973)—could see behind enemy lines and provide imagery intelligence.

Israel had excellent signals intelligence collection capabilities using the high ground of Mount Hermon on the Golan and the mountains of the Sinai to listen deep behind enemy lines.

masses of intelligence indicators showing the enormous build-up of the two Arab armies, and an extraordinary human intelligence asset inside Egypt.

Eighty percent of the army was reservists who had to be mobilized to fight. The intelligence service was critical to defense. They were supposed to provide at least two days’ warning of an attack to allow time for the reserves to be called up, mobilized, and deployed to the fronts on the Suez and Golan. The DMI had promised in writing in 1972 that five to six days of warning was much more likely, indeed virtually guaranteed.

All indicators of war preparations and any warnings of war were fed into the concept and then explained away.

Israeli intelligence failed to see war coming in 1973 because it was wedded to a concept (kontzeptziya in Hebrew) that the Arabs would not go to war because they would lose, therefore the danger of war was minimal.

The Arab terrorist attack may have been designed to deflect Israeli attention away from the Levant to the Danube.

The Arabs were too weak to attack.

He was also turning Israel’s strategic thinking on its head: Israel was focused on Egypt as the main threat because it was a larger country with a more competent military; Hussein was saying that Israel’s immediate danger will be Syria, which is ready for war and much closer to Israel’s homeland.

Then he turned to his most important point, that Syria was now fully ready for war. On the Syrian front, he said, “a very, very sensitive source in Syria” had told Jordan that it was ready for war, that the army was already deployed in “pre-jump positions” to attack when the order was given.

Jordan’s General Intelligence Directorate had recruited a Syrian army division commander who had excellent access to Syrian war plans. Syrian sources, as well as Jordanian, have reported that the major general, who had been recruited in 1971 after Assad’s coup, provided detailed information on Syria’s war plan and its cooperation with Egypt.3

Exactly what the king told Golda is still controversial. The earliest accounts of the meeting in Israeli newspapers—in 1993, 20 years after the meeting—claimed the king brought an explicit warning that Syria and Egypt were about to attack Israel, a warning that the prime minister failed to heed, leading to the surprise attack on Israel on October 6, 1973. The former head of the DMI, General Eli Zeira, claimed in 1993 when the story broke about the king’s trip that the prime minister had received a warning of war from “a very senior Arab personality,” which the papers identified as King Hussein.2