9 - Yom Kippur War

Summary

On that Yom Kippur one, we just had convinced ourselves that it didn't make sense. And it didn't!

William Colby, 1991

I think we were surprised to some degree by the Egyptian's attack, but not totally.

Hal Saunders, 1993

On 6 October 1973, Egypt and Syria coordinated a lightening surprise attack against Israel. Though short-lived, it was a war that would change the face of the modern Middle East. Launched at 2 p.m. on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, the Sabbath of Yom Kippur, the momentum of the attack carried Egyptian armoured units several miles east of the Suez Canal. Within just three days the Egyptian military were blocked by Israeli retaliation, yet the initial achievements of the Egyptians marked a symbolic turning point in world history. In retrospect the war marked the first step towards a bilateral peace treaty between Egypt and Israel that would dramatically alter Egypt's seminal role in the international politics of the Middle East. Moreover, it was a conflict with strikingly international implications, bringing the world's superpowers to the brink of a nuclear confrontation in support of their respective allies and provoking the first global oil crisis in numerous European capitals. Arab states united in an unprecedented manner to impose an oil embargo that would visibly punish the United States for backing Israel.

Most scholars have explored the intelligence failure of the Yom Kippur War from the Israeli perspective, with the assumption that the CIA was complicit in this failure because of the close relations that characterised the American and Israeli intelligence communities. Surprisingly few works have sought to explain how and why Britain and America were unable to foresee that Egypt was planning an attack on 6 October 1973. A leading intelligence historian concludes that the attack on Israel was ‘not foreseen by any of the world's major intelligence services’. A recently declassified post-mortem by the CIA found that intelligence of an impending attack was ‘plentiful, ominous and often accurate’, if only they had put the pieces together.