In the fall of 1973, the Syrian Armybegan to gather a large number of

tanks, artillery batteries, and infantryalong its border with Israel. Simultane-ously, to the south, the Egyptian Armycancelled all leaves, called up thousandsof reservists, and launched a massive mil-itary exercise,building roads and prepar-ing anti-aircraft and artillery positions

along the Suez Canal. On October 4th,an Israeli aerial reconnaissance missionshowed that the Egyptians had movedartillery into offensive positions.That eve-ning, AMAN, the Israeli military intelli-gence agency, learned that portions ofthe Soviet fleet near Port Said and Al-exandria had set sail, and that the So-viet government had begun airlifting thefamilies of Soviet advisers out of Cairoand Damascus. Then, at four o’clock inthe morning on October 6th, Israel’s di-rector of military intelligence received anurgent telephone call from one of the

country’s most trusted intelligence sources.Egypt and Syria, the source said, wouldattack later that day. Top Israeli officialsimmediately called a meeting. Was warimminent? The head of AMAN, MajorGeneral Eli Zeira, looked over the evi-dence and said he didn’t think so.He waswrong. That afternoon, Syria attackedfrom the east, overwhelming the thin

Israeli defenses in the Golan Heights,and Egypt attacked from the south,bombing Israeli positions and sendingeight thousand infantry streaming acrossthe Suez.Despite all the warnings of theprevious weeks, Israeli officials werecaught by surprise. Why couldn’t theyconnect the dots?

If you start on the afternoon of Oc-tober 6th and work backward, the trail ofclues pointing to an attack seems obvi-ous; you’d have to conclude that some-thing was badly wrong with the Israeliintelligence service.On the other hand, if

you start several years before the Yom Kip-pur War and work forward, re-creatingwhat people in Israeli intelligence knewin the same order that they knew it,a very different picture emerges. In thefall of 1973, Egypt and Syria certainlylooked as if they were preparing to go to war. But, in the Middle East of thetime, countries always looked as if theywere going to war. In the fall of 1971,for instance, both Egypt’s President andits minister of war stated publicly thatthe hour of battle was approaching.TheEgyptian Army was mobilized. Tanksand bridging equipment were sent to the canal.Offensive positions were read-ied. And nothing happened. In Decem-ber of 1972, the Egyptians mobilizedagain. The Army furiously built fortifi-cations along the canal.A reliable sourcetold Israeli intelligence that an attackwas imminent. Nothing happened. Inthe spring of 1973, the President ofEgypt told Newsweek that everything in his country “is now being mobilized inearnest for the resumption of battle.”Egyptian forces were moved closer tothe canal. Extensive fortifications werebuilt along the Suez. Blood donors wererounded up. Civil-defense personnelwere mobilized.Blackouts were imposedthroughout Egypt.A trusted source toldIsraeli intelligence that an attack wasimminent. It didn’t come. Between Jan-uary and October of 1973, the EgyptianArmy mobilized nineteen times withoutgoing to war. The Israeli governmentcouldn’t mobilize its Army every time its neighbors threatened war. Israel is asmall country with a citizen Army. Mo-bilization was disruptive and expensive,and the Israeli government was acutelyaware that if its Army was mobilizedand Egypt and Syria weren’t seriousabout war, the very act of mobilizationmight cause them to become seriousabout war.

Nor did the other signs seem remark-able. The fact that the Soviet familieshad been sent home could have signifiednothing more than a falling-out be-tween the Arab states and Moscow.Yes,a trusted source called at four in themorning, with definite word of a late-afternoon attack, but his last two attackwarnings had been wrong.What’s more,the source said that the attack wouldcome at sunset, and an attack so late in the day wouldn’t leave enough time

A CRITIC AT LARGE

CONNECTING THE DOTS

The paradoxes of intelligence reform.

BY MALCOLM GLADWELL

ERIC

PA

LMA

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Biased by “creeping determinism,” we’re led to think that every surprise was foreseeable.

for opening air strikes. Israeli intelli-gence didn’t see the pattern of Arab in-tentions, in other words, because, untilEgypt and Syria actually attacked, onthe afternoon of October 6, 1973, theirintentions didn’t form a pattern. Theyformed a Rorschach blot. What is clearin hindsight is rarely clear before the fact. It’s an obvious point, but one thatnonetheless bears repeating, particularlywhen we’re in the midst of assigningblame for the surprise attack of Septem-ber 11th.

Of the many postmortems conductedafter September 11th, the one that

has received the most attention is “TheCell: Inside the 9/11 Plot, and Why the F.B.I. and C.I.A. Failed to Stop It” (Hyperion; $24.95), by John Miller,Michael Stone, and Chris Mitchell. Theauthors begin their tale with El Say-yid Nosair, the Egyptian who was ar-rested in November of 1990 for shoot-ing Rabbi Meir Kahane, the founder of the Jewish Defense League, in theballroom of the Marriott Hotel in mid-town Manhattan. Nosair’s apartment in New Jersey was searched, and investi-gators found sixteen boxes of files, in-cluding training manuals from the ArmySpecial Warfare School; copies of tele-types that had been routed to the Joint

Chiefs of Staff; bombmaking manuals;and maps, annotated in Arabic, of land-marks like the Statue of Liberty,Rocke-feller Center, and the World TradeCenter. According to “The Cell,” Nos-air was connected to gunrunners and to Islamic radicals in Brooklyn, whowere in turn behind the World TradeCenter bombing two and a half yearslater,which was masterminded by RamziYousef, who then showed up in Ma-nila in 1994, apparently plotting to kill the Pope, crash a plane into the Pen-tagon or the C.I.A., and bomb as many as twelve transcontinental airliners sim-ultaneously. And who was Yousef as-sociating with in the Philippines? Mo-hammed Khalifa, Wali Khan Amin-Shah, and Ibrahim Munir, all of whomhad fought alongside, pledged a loyaltyoath to, or worked for a shadowy SaudiArabian millionaire named Osama binLaden.

Miller was a network-television cor-respondent throughout much of the pastdecade, and the best parts of “The Cell”recount his own experiences in coveringthe terrorist story.He is an extraordinaryreporter. At the time of the first WorldTrade Center attack, in February of1993, he clapped a flashing light on thedashboard of his car and followed thewave of emergency vehicles downtown.

(At the bombing site, he was continu-ously trailed by a knot of reporters—Iwas one of them—who had concludedthat the best way to learn what was goingon was to try to overhear his conversa-tions.) Miller became friends with theF.B.I. agents who headed the New Yorkcounterterrorist office—Neil Hermanand John O’Neill, in particular—and he became as obsessed with Al Qaeda as they were. He was in Yemen, with the F.B.I., after Al Qaeda bombed theU.S.S. Cole. In 1998, at the Marriott inIslamabad, he and his cameraman metsomeone known to them only as Akhtar,who spirited them across the border intothe hills of Afghanistan to interviewOsama bin Laden. In “The Cell,” theperiod from 1990 through Septem-ber 11th becomes a seamless,devastatingnarrative: the evolution of Al Qaeda.“How did this happen to us?” the bookasks in its opening pages. The answer,the authors argue, can be found by fol-lowing the “thread”connecting Kahane’smurder to September 11th. In the eventsof the past decade, they declare, there isa clear “recurring pattern.”

The same argument is made by Sen-ator Richard Shelby, vice-chairman ofthe Senate Select Committee on Intelli-gence, in his investigative report on Sep-tember 11th, released this past Decem-ber. The report is a lucid and powerfuldocument, in which Shelby painstak-ingly points out all the missed or misin-terpreted signals pointing to a major ter-rorist attack. The C.I.A. knew that twosuspected Al Qaeda operatives, Khalidal-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, hadentered the country,but the C.I.A.didn’ttell the F.B.I. or the N.S.C. An F.B.I.agent in Phoenix sent a memo to head-quarters that began with the sentence“The purpose of this communication isto advise the bureau and New York ofthe possibility of a coordinated effort byOsama Bin Laden to send students tothe United States to attend civilian avia-tion universities and colleges.” But theF.B.I. never acted on the information,and failed to connect it with reports thatterrorists were interested in using air-planes as weapons. The F.B.I. took intocustody the suspected terrorist ZacariasMoussaoui, on account of his suspiciousbehavior at flight school, but was unableto integrate his case into a larger pictureof terrorist behavior. “The most funda-

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“Well, how long do you want to live?”

• •

mental problem . . . is our IntelligenceCommunity’s inability to ‘connect thedots’ available to it before September 11,2001, about terrorists’ interest in attack-ing symbolic American targets,” theShelby report states. The phrase “con-nect the dots” appears so often in the re-port that it becomes a kind of mantra.There was a pattern, as plain as day inretrospect, yet the vaunted American in-telligence community simply could notsee it.

None of these postmortems, how-ever, answer the question raised by theYom Kippur War: Was this pattern ob-vious before the attack? This question—whether we revise our judgment ofevents after the fact—is something thatpsychologists have paid a great deal ofattention to. For example, on the eve ofRichard Nixon’s historic visit to China,the psychologist Baruch Fischhoff askeda group of people to estimate the prob-ability of a series of possible outcomes of the trip. What were the chances thatthe trip would lead to permanent dip-lomatic relations between China andthe United States? That Nixon wouldmeet with the leader of China, MaoTse-tung, at least once? That Nixonwould call the trip a success? As it turnedout, the trip was a diplomatic triumph,and Fischhoff then went back to thesame people and asked them to recallwhat their estimates of the differentoutcomes of the visit had been.He foundthat the subjects now, overwhelmingly,“remembered” being more optimisticthan they had actually been. If you orig-inally thought that it was unlikely thatNixon would meet with Mao, after-ward, when the press was full of ac-counts of Nixon’s meeting with Mao,you’d “remember” that you had thoughtthe chances of a meeting were prettygood. Fischhoff calls this phenomenon“creeping determinism”—the sense thatgrows on us, in retrospect, that what hashappened was actually inevitable—andthe chief effect of creeping determin-ism, he points out, is that it turns unex-pected events into expected events.As hewrites, “The occurrence of an event in-creases its reconstructed probability andmakes it less surprising than it wouldhave been had the original probabilitybeen remembered.”

To read the Shelby report, or theseamless narrative from Nosair to bin

Laden in “The Cell,” is to be convincedthat if the C.I.A.and the F.B.I.had sim-ply been able to connect the dots whathappened on September 11th shouldnot have been a surprise at all. Is this afair criticism or is it just a case of creep-ing determinism?

On August 7, 1998, two Al Qaedaterrorists detonated a cargo truck

filled with explosives outside the UnitedStates Embassy in Nairobi, killing twohundred and thirteen people and injur-ing more than four thousand. Miller,Stone, and Mitchell see the KenyanEmbassy bombing as a textbook exam-ple of intelligence failure. The C.I.A.,they tell us, had identified an Al Qaedacell in Kenya well before the attack, andits members were under surveillance.They had an eight-page letter, written by an Al Qaeda operative, speaking ofthe imminent arrival of “engineers”—the code word for bombmakers—inNairobi. The United States Ambassa-dor to Kenya, Prudence Bushnell, hadbegged Washington for more security.Aprominent Kenyan lawyer and legislatorsays that the Kenyan intelligence servicewarned U.S. intelligence about the plotseveral months before August 7th, andin November of 1997 a man namedMustafa Mahmoud Said Ahmed, whoworked for one of Osama bin Lad-en’s companies, walked into the UnitedStates Embassy in Nairobi and toldAmerican intelligence of a plot to blowup the building. What did our offi-cials do? They forced the leader of theKenyan cell—a U.S. citizen—to returnhome, and then abruptly halted theirsurveillance of the group. They ignoredthe eight-page letter. They allegedlyshowed the Kenyan intelligence service’swarning to the Mossad,which dismissedit, and after questioning Ahmed theydecided that he wasn’t credible. Afterthe bombing,“The Cell” tells us, a seniorState Department official phoned Bush-nell and asked, “How could this havehappened?”

“For the first time since the blast,”Miller,Stone,and Mitchell write,“Bush-nell’s horror turned to anger. There wastoo much history. ‘I wrote you a letter,’she said.”

This is all very damning, but doesn’t it fall into the creeping-determinismtrap? It is not at all clear that it passes

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the creeping-determinism test. It’s anedited version of the past. What wedon’t hear about is all the other peoplewhom American intelligence had undersurveillance, how many other warningsthey received, and how many other tipscame in that seemed promising at thetime but led nowhere.The central chal-lenge of intelligence gathering has al-ways been the problem of “noise”: thefact that useless information is vastlymore plentiful than useful informa-tion. Shelby’s report mentions that theF.B.I.’s counterterrorism division hassixty-eight thousand outstanding andunassigned leads dating back to 1995.And, of those, probably no more than afew hundred are useful. Analysts, inshort, must be selective, and the deci-sions made in Kenya, by that standard,do not seem unreasonable. Surveillanceon the cell was shut down, but, then,its leader had left the country. Bush-nell warned Washington—but, as “TheCell” admits, there were bomb warn-ings in Africa all the time. Officials at the Mossad thought the Kenyan in-telligence was dubious, and the Mos-sad ought to know. Ahmed may haveworked for bin Laden but he failed apolygraph test, and it was also learnedthat he had previously given similar—groundless—warnings to other embas-sies in Africa. When a man comes intoyour office, fails a lie-detector test, andis found to have shopped the same un-substantiated story all over town, canyou be blamed for turning him out?

Miller,Stone, and Mitchell make thesame mistake when they quote from atranscript of a conversation that was re-corded by Italian intelligence in Augustof 2001 between two Al Qaeda opera-tives, Abdel Kader Es Sayed and a manknown as al Hilal. This, they say, is yetanother piece of intelligence that “seemedto forecast the September 11 attacks.”

“I’ve been studying airplanes,” al Hilaltells Es Sayed. “If God wills, I hope to be ableto bring you a window or a piece of a planethe next time I see you.”

“What, is there a jihad planned?” EsSayed asks.

“In the future, listen to the news and re-member these words: ‘Up above,’ ” al Hilalreplies.

Es Sayed thinks that al Hilal is referring toan operation in his native Yemen, but al Hilalcorrects him: “But the surprise attack willcome from the other country, one of those at-tacks you will never forget.”

A moment later al Hilal says about theplan, “It is something terrifying that goesfrom south to north, east to west. The personwho devised this plan is a madman, but a ge-nius. He will leave them frozen [in shock].”

This is a tantalizing exchange. Itwould now seem that it refers to Sep-tember 11th. But in what sense was it a“forecast”? It gave neither time nor placenor method nor target. It suggested onlythat there were terrorists out there wholiked to talk about doing something dra-matic with an airplane—which did not,it must be remembered, reliably distin-guish them from any other terrorists ofthe past thirty years.

In the real world, intelligence is invariably ambiguous. Informationabout enemy intentions tends to beshort on detail. And information that’srich in detail tends to be short on in-tentions. In April of 1941, for in-stance, the Allies learned that Ger-many had moved a huge army up tothe Russian front.The intelligence wasbeyond dispute: the troops could beseen and counted. But what did itmean? Churchill concluded that Hit-ler wanted to attack Russia. Stalin con-cluded that Hitler was serious aboutattacking, but only if the Soviet Uniondidn’t meet the terms of the Ger-man ultimatum. The British foreignsecretary, Anthony Eden, thought thatHitler was bluffing, in the hope ofwinning further Russian concessions.British intelligence thought—at least,in the beginning—that Hitler simplywanted to reinforce his eastern frontieragainst a possible Soviet attack. Theonly way for this piece of intelligenceto have been definitive wold have beenif the Allies had a second piece of in-telligence—like the phone call be-tween al Hilal and Es Sayed—thatdemonstrated Germany’s true pur-pose. Similarly, the only way the alHilal phone call would have been de-finitive is if we’d also had intelligenceas detailed as the Allied knowledge ofGerman troop movements. But rarely

do intelligence services have the luxuryof both kinds of information. Nor aretheir analysts mind readers. It is onlywith hindsight that human beings ac-quire that skill.

“The Cell” tells us that, in the finalmonths before September 11th, Wash-ington was frantic with worry:

A spike in phone traffic among suspectedal Qaeda members in the early part of thesummer [of 2001], as well as debriefings of[an al Qaeda operative in custody] who hadbegun cooperating with the government, con-vinced investigators that bin Laden was plan-ning a significant operation—one interceptedal Qaeda message spoke of a “Hiroshima-type” event—and that he was planning itsoon. Through the summer, the CIA repeat-edly warned the White House that attackswere imminent.

The fact that these worries did notprotect us is not evidence of the lim-itations of the intelligence commu-nity. It is evidence of the limitations ofintelligence.

In the early nineteen-seventies, a pro-fessor of psychology at Stanford

University named David L. Rosenhangathered together a painter, a graduatestudent, a pediatrician, a psychiatrist, ahousewife, and three psychologists. Hetold them to check into different psychi-atric hospitals under aliases, with thecomplaint that they had been hearingvoices. They were instructed to say thatthe voices were unfamiliar, and that theyheard words like “empty,” “thud,” and“hollow.” Apart from that initial story,the pseudo patients were instructed toanswer every question truthfully, to be-have as they normally would, and to tellthe hospital staff—at every opportu-nity—that the voices were gone and thatthey had experienced no further symp-toms. The eight subjects were hospital-ized, on average, for nineteen days. Onewas kept for almost two months.Rosen-han wanted to find out if the hospitalstaffs would ever see through the ruse.They never did.

Rosenhan’s test is, in a way, a classicintelligence problem. Here was a signal(a sane person) buried in a mountain of conflicting and confusing noise (amental hospital), and the intelligenceanalysts (the doctors) were asked toconnect the dots—and they failedspectacularly. In the course of theirhospital stay, the eight pseudo patientswere given a total of twenty-one hun-

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dred pills.They underwent psychiatricinterviews, and sober case summariesdocumenting their pathologies werewritten up.They were asked by Rosen-han to take notes documenting howthey were treated, and this quickly be-came part of their supposed pathology.“Patient engaging in writing behav-ior,” one nurse ominously wrote in hernotes. Having been labelled as ill uponadmission, they could not shake thediagnosis. “Nervous?” a friendly nurseasked one of the subjects as he pacedthe halls one day. “No,” he correctedher, to no avail, “bored.”

The solution to this problem seemsobvious enough. Doctors and nursesneed to be made alert to the possibilitythat sane people sometimes get admit-ted to mental hospitals. So Rosenhanwent to a research-and-teaching hos-pital and informed the staff that atsome point in the next three monthshe would once again send over one or more of his pseudo patients. Thistime, of the hundred and ninety-threepatients admitted in the three-monthperiod, forty-one were identified by atleast one staff member as being almostcertainly sane. Once again, however,they were wrong. Rosenhan hadn’t sentanyone over. In attempting to solve onekind of intelligence problem (over-diagnosis), the hospital simply createdanother problem (underdiagnosis).This is the second, and perhaps moreserious, consequence of creeping de-terminism: in our zeal to correct whatwe believe to be the problems of thepast, we end up creating new problemsfor the future.

Pearl Harbor, for example, waswidely considered to be an organiza-tional failure. The United States hadall the evidence it needed to predictthe Japanese attack, but the signalswere scattered throughout the vari-ous intelligence services. The Armyand the Navy didn’t talk to each other.They spent all their time arguing and competing. This was, in part, whythe Central Intelligence Agency wascreated, in 1947—to insure that all intelligence would be collected andprocessed in one place. Twenty yearsafter Pearl Harbor, the United Statessuffered another catastrophic intelli-gence failure, at the Bay of Pigs: theKennedy Administration grossly un-

derestimated the Cubans’ capacity tofight and their support for Fidel Cas-tro. This time, however, the diagnosiswas completely different. As Irving L.Janis concluded in his famous study of“groupthink,” the root cause of the Bayof Pigs fiasco was that the operationwas conceived by a small, highly cohe-sive group whose close ties inhibitedthe beneficial effects of argument andcompetition. Centralization was nowthe problem. One of the most influen-tial organizational sociologists of thepostwar era, Harold Wilensky, wentout of his way to praise the “construc-tive rivalry” fostered by Franklin D.Roosevelt, which, he says, is why thePresident had such formidable intelli-gence on how to attack the economicills of the Great Depression. In hisclassic 1967 work “Organizational In-telligence,” Wilensky pointed out thatRoosevelt would

use one anonymous informant’s informa-tion to challenge and check another’s, put-ting both on their toes; he recruited strongpersonalities and structured their work sothat clashes would be certain. . . . In foreignaffairs, he gave Moley and Welles tasks thatoverlapped those of Secretary of State Hull;in conservation and power, he gave Ickesand Wallace identical missions; in welfare,confusing both functions and initials, he as-signed PWA to Ickes, WPA to Hopkins; inpolitics, Farley found himself competingwith other political advisors for control overpatronage. The effect: the timely advertise-ment of arguments, with both the expertsand the President pressured to consider themain choices as they came boiling up frombelow.

The intelligence community that wehad prior to September 11th was the di-rect result of this philosophy.The F.B.I.and the C.I.A. were supposed to be ri-vals, just as Ickes and Wallace were rivals.But now we’ve changed our minds. TheF.B.I. and the C.I.A., Senator Shelbytells us disapprovingly, argue and com-pete with one another. The Septem-ber 11th story, his report concludes,“should be an object lesson in the perilsof failing to share information promptlyand efficiently between (and within)organizations.” Shelby wants recentral-ization and more focus on coöpera-tion. He wants a “central national levelknowledge-compiling entity standingabove and independent from the dispu-tatious bureaucracies.”He thinks the in-telligence service should be run by asmall, highly cohesive group, and so

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he suggests that the F.B.I. be removedfrom the counterterrorism business en-tirely. The F.B.I., according to Shelby,is governed by

deeply-entrenched individual mindsets thatprize the production of evidence-supportednarratives of defendant wrongdoing over thedrawing of probabilistic inferences based onincomplete and fragmentary information inorder to support decision-making. . . . Lawenforcement organizations handle informa-tion, reach conclusions, and ultimately justthink differently than intelligence organiza-tions. Intelligence analysts would doubtlessmake poor policemen, and it has become veryclear that policemen make poor intelligenceanalysts.

In his State of the Union Message,Pres-ident George W. Bush did what Shelbywanted,and announced the formation ofthe Terrorist Threat Integration Cen-ter—a special unit combining the an-titerrorist activities of the F.B.I. and theC.I.A. The cultural and organizationaldiversity of the intelligence business,once prized, is now despised.

The truth is, though, that it is just aseasy, in the wake of September 11th, tomake the case for the old system. Isn’t itan advantage that the F.B.I. doesn’tthink like the C.I.A.? It was the F.B.I.,after all, that produced two of the mostprescient pieces of analysis—the requestby the Minneapolis office for a war-rant to secretly search Zacarias Mous-saoui’s belongings, and the now famousPhoenix memo. In both cases, what wasvaluable about the F.B.I.’s analysis wasprecisely the way in which it differedfrom the traditional “big picture,” prob-abilistic inference-making of the ana-lyst. The F.B.I. agents in the field fo-cussed on a single case, dug deep, andcame up with an “evidence-supportednarrative of defendant wrongdoing” thatspoke volumes about a possible AlQaeda threat.

The same can be said for the allegedproblem of rivalry. “The Cell” describeswhat happened after police in the Philip-pines searched the apartment that RamziYousef shared with his co-conspirator,Abdul Hakim Murad. Agents from theF.B.I.’s counterterrorism unit immedi-ately flew to Manila and “bumped upagainst the C.I.A.” As the old adageabout the Bureau and the Agency has it,the F.B.I.wanted to string Murad up andthe C.I.A. wanted to string him along.The two groups eventually worked to-gether, but only because they had to. It

was a relationship “marred by rivalry andmistrust.” But what’s wrong with thiskind of rivalry? As Miller, Stone, andMitchell tell us, the real objection ofNeil Herman—the F.B.I.’s former do-mestic counterterrorism chief—to “work-ing with the C.I.A. had nothing to dowith procedure. He just didn’t think theAgency was going to be of any help in finding Ramzi Yousef. ‘Back then, Idon’t think the C.I.A. could have founda person in a bathroom,’ ” Herman says.“ ‘Hell, I don’t think they could havefound the bathroom.’ ” The assumptionof the reformers is always that the rivalrybetween the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. is es-sentially marital, that it is the dysfunc-tion of people who ought to work to-gether but can’t. But it could equally beseen as a version of the marketplace ri-valry that leads to companies workingharder and making better products.

There is no such thing as a perfectintelligence system, and every seem-ing improvement involves a tradeoff. Acouple of months ago, for example, asuspect in custody in Canada, who waswanted in New York on forgery charges,gave police the names and photographsof five Arab immigrants, who he saidhad crossed the border into the UnitedStates. The F.B.I. put out an alert onDecember 29th, posting the names andphotographs on its Web site, in the “waron terrorism” section. Even PresidentBush joined in, saying, “We need toknow why they have been smuggled intothe country, what they’re doing in thecountry.” As it turned out, the suspect inCanada had made the story up. After-ward, an F.B.I. official said that theagency circulated the photographs inorder to “err on the side of caution.”Ourintelligence services today are highlysensitive. But this kind of sensitivity isnot without its costs.As the political sci-entist Richard K.Betts wrote in his essay“Analysis, War, and Decision: Why In-telligence Failures Are Inevitable,”“Mak-ing warning systems more sensitive re-duces the risk of surprise, but increasesthe number of false alarms, which inturn reduces sensitivity.” When we runout and buy duct tape to seal our win-dows against chemical attack, and noth-ing happens, and when the govern-ment’s warning light is orange for weekson end, and nothing happens, we soonbegin to doubt every warning that comes

our way. Why was the Pacific fleet atPearl Harbor so unresponsive to signs ofan impending Japanese attack? Because,in the week before December 7, 1941,they had checked out seven reports ofJapanese submarines in the area—and allseven were false. Rosenhan’s psychia-trists used to miss the sane; then theystarted to see sane people everywhere.That is a change, but it is not exactlyprogress.

In the wake of the Yom Kippur War,the Israeli government appointed a

special investigative commission, andone of the witnesses called was MajorGeneral Zeira, the head of AMAN.Why,they asked, had he insisted that war wasnot imminent? His answer was simple:

The Chief of Staff has to make decisions,and his decisions must be clear. The best sup-port that the head of AMAN can give the Chiefof Staff is to give a clear and unambiguous es-timate, provided that it is done in an objectivefashion. To be sure, the clearer and sharperthe estimate, the clearer and sharper the mis-take—but this is a professional hazard for thehead of AMAN.

The historians Eliot A. Cohen andJohn Gooch, in their book “MilitaryMisfortunes,” argue that it was Zeira’scertainty that had proved fatal:“The cul-pable failure of AMAN’s leaders in Sep-tember and October 1973 lay not intheir belief that Egypt would not attackbut in their supreme confidence, whichdazzled decision-makers. . . . Ratherthan impress upon the prime minister,the chief of staff and the minister ofdefense the ambiguity of the situation,they insisted—until the last day—thatthere would be no war, period.”

But, of course, Zeira gave an unam-biguous answer to the question of warbecause that is what politicians and thepublic demanded of him. No one wantsambiguity. Today, the F.B.I. gives uscolor-coded warnings and speaks of “in-creased chatter” among terrorist opera-tives, and the information is infuriatingto us because it is so vague. What does“increased chatter” mean? We want aprediction. We want to believe that theintentions of our enemies are a puzzlethat intelligence services can piece to-gether, so that a clear story emerges. Butthere rarely is a clear story—at least, notuntil afterward, when some enterprisingjournalist or investigative committee de-cides to write one. ♦

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Repetition,by Alain Robbe-Grillet, trans-lated from the French by Richard Howard(Grove; $23). The grand old man of thenouveau roman has published his firstnovel in two decades, and, faithful to itstitle, it is not at all new but, rather, avariation on old themes and obsessions.In fact, “Repetition” is a sort of deliber-ate distortion—or alteration, or rewrit-ing, or retelling—of Robbe-Grillet’searlier books, in particular the first,“TheErasers” (1953). The plot, such as it is,concerns a French secret agent who, in1949, is sent to Berlin, where he wit-nesses a murder.This leads him to searchout his own past.The reader,meanwhile,is led to distrust every narrator who popsup. Robbe-Grillet’s conviction that thetrue writer has nothing to say, only theway he says it, remains undimmed, butseldom has the nouveau roman seemedso ancien.

Any Human Heart, by William Boyd(Knopf;$24.95).Couched as the diary ofone Logan Mountstuart—writer, se-ducer, spy, and all-around charlatan—Boyd’s novel attempts a panorama oftwentieth-century history with its heroconstantly at the edge of the frame.Mountstuart dines with Bloomsbury-ites, meets Joyce in Paris, spends theSpanish Civil War hobnobbing withHemingway and the Second World Wartrailing the Duke of Windsor for BritishIntelligence.Later,he runs an art galleryin New York, and gets mixed up in theNigerian civil war and with the Baader-Meinhof gang.Such an antic plot shouldnot succeed, and yet disbelief remainssuspended, thanks to Boyd’s skill in pro-ducing a novel that successfully mimics a diary in all its human pettiness. He allows Mountstuart’s voice to age like

port: the precocious schoolboy blithelyspeculates that the “announcement of afuture fact has a tenuous hold on thepresent moment,” while the adult re-flects,“It’s always hard trying to imaginethe loss of something you never had.”

What I Loved, by Siri Hustvedt (HenryHolt; $25). When the narrator of Hust-vedt’s third novel, an affable art-historyprofessor at Columbia called Leo Hertz-berg, buys a picture by Bill Wechsler, alugubrious, handsome painter, a friend-ship ensues. It’s 1975, admiration leadsto intimacy, and the two men and theirwives end up living in the same buildingon Greene Street. The revolver on thewall is a Swiss Army knife that Leo giveshis son for his eleventh birthday: when it goes missing, the book turns fromnovel of art-world manners to psycho-logical thriller. Hustvedt is terrific atevoking the milieu of the haute bour-geoisie—the house in Vermont, thewine-drenched meals, the migraines.But, as a narrator, Leo, now a reminis-cent seventy, is full of orotund declara-tions about life and love that muffle thewell-constructed plot.

A Life of Privilege, Mostly, by GardnerBotsford (St.Martin’s;$24.95).The “priv-ilege” in the title of Botsford’s grufflystylish memoir is his upbringing as theson of a Midwestern heiress; “mostly” ishis dry way of alluding to the SecondWorld War. He served in the First In-fantry Division (which lost more thantwenty thousand men) and saw action at Omaha Beach and the Battle of theBulge.Though he was “damn near killed,”he finished the war a heavily decoratedcaptain.Among the many miraculous co-incidences of war—a bullet dodged, anold friend randomly encountered—Bots-ford had the good fortune to meet A. J.Liebling at the front.This came in handywhen, after the war, Botsford became aneditor—and, eventually, Liebling’s edi-tor—at The New Yorker: “Although itwas an article of faith with him that alleditors were incompetent losers,he musthave decided to be nice to me as a ges-ture to the First Division.”

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THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 10, 2003 89

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