@Bill – I see we took the the same assessment of the Cold Spy

In more detail, his 11 points arent even 11 points – obviously Cold Spy wants to make use of the Digg effect where numbered lists seem to get much more prominence…

The overarching issue I have with it, and all similar analysis postings, is that we are working from a position of vast ignorance. We have no idea what risks were assessed and tolerated, what other risks were mitigated against and what other constraints the operation was planned under. Its trivial for *us* to sit at our PC (or Mac for the weirdos) and discuss what *we* would or wouldnt have done based on our assumptions (normally along the lines of Mossad operators are superhuman, no risk is acceptable, one man can do the job of 20 etc. I blame Bourne for this).

So, of the 11 points:

1 – not a mistake. A best this is an operational decision they may not use again. However it may well be the case that a passport that has “lived” on international travel systems will get less scrutiny than one belonging to an adult who has only just bothered to get it. Even middle eastern countries try to screen out terrorists….

2 – Not really a mistake unless the operational decision had been to hide their faces. That said, if you were at a border control point and someone came through trying to disguise their face, what would you do? (allowing entry is probably low on the list)

3 – How do you know they didnt? We assume they didnt and they may well not have but given the widespread surprise about how well the Dubai police reacted to this and built an evidence pack, its possible they did indeed make that mistake. Its also possible that Mossad (or whoever) accepted this risk and, as others have said, given that not one of the team have been found yet it seems an acceptable risk to me.

4 – not a mistake at all, in fact this is probably fairly good operational practice depending on the goal. If they didnt know where the target would be, they have to make sure they are as flexible as possible so getting several locations is good. This activity did not lead to their plan being compromised and only came to light *after* they had left the country. Is this a mistake or an operational judgement?

5 – I dont understand why this is a mistake at all, so I might have misread it. I will withold judgement in case someone can explain it a bit better.

6 – I am not sure this is a mistake or significantly differrent from #3. The mistake may well have been to hope that the police would assume natural causes and not investigate and if everything else was built on that these decisions cease to be mistakes. Can an operational decision that has no negative impact on the outcome of the operation be called a mistake? It seems to me that (again assuming Mossad) this is a message that cuts both ways. One country can say “dont do it on our soil” (but if you do, we wont catch you) and the other says “You arent safe anywhere.” Either way its good PR if you are that way inclined.

7 – this is 6 repeated.

8 – If they did this with 11 people I am impressed. Unless that 1 person is Jason Bourne, James Bond or similar, its not possible. Even a street robbery would need more than 1 person. The key is that this is not a street robbery, so unlike a crack addict robber they have to factor lots and lots of things into the equation – not least of which is controlling who is in the vicinity at the time of the attack. A street robber is attacking any person who passes, this is an attack on a specific person. Massive difference and one that needs lots and lots of people.

9 – pretty much contradicts everything else. Why is it harder for a film to fake a car crash than to have one in real life? In real life things just happen, a mugger just stabs their victim. In a staged attack things have to be set up to look real enough without leaving any loose ends. If you go down the cut out, which you then kill route, it gets even more confusing (do you kill the killer, and the killer of the killer’s killer etc). Madness and I have never heard of it happening in real life (*).

10 – how is this a mistake? Not only is more time in country more dangerous (risk of compromise) but how do we know the attacking agency had that much notice? Even once they have the solid intelligence plans have to be made, budgets checked, authority granted etc. Why would more time have led to it being called off? Was the target planning to visit a load of low security countries? (Do any still exist?). It strkes me their plan was reasonably well thought out but everything carries risk.

11 – see 6 again.

Overall, no mistakes. Risks were taken and some of these risks were realised. If this never happened, they wouldnt be risks.

We could argue all day as to if the organisation which did this was right to accept all these risks but we dont know what else they considered.

As anyone who works in security knows even with the best will in the world, with flawless execution sometimes the residual risk happens.

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(*) but then I wouldnt…

Posted by: GreenSquirrel at March 22, 2010 9:50 AM

It stands to reason that if the Israelis did this job, they invested heavily in the people that executed it, they probably wouldn’t want to burn that investment. Also, they are their own, Jews that is, so that there is the issue of loyalty to kin, so to speak.

Then, they probably wouldn’t want to scald their intelligence service by killing off their own, a move which wouldn’t exactly inspire trust in leaders and inspire loyalty. Disappearing one agent is one thing, but to do that to an entire team, of eleven? These people are very specialised. I assume that very few intelligence services have so many so specially trained specialists that they can easily lose or spare an entire team, in a way that doesn’t get noticed.