Complicated Plots, Undetected

October 7, the pager attack, and the Biden incapacity coverup

As the year 2024 draws to a close, the failure to detect secret plots strikes me as an issue that we need to think long and hard about. Many people had to keep a secret in order for the October 7 assault to take place, in order for Israel’s pager attack to work, and in order for President Biden’s incapacity to be covered up. Organizations all over the world will have to come to terms with these exploits and think about how to prevent them. What lessons will be learned?

October 7 surprise

Consider the challenge for Hamas of planning and preparing the October 7 attack in secret. Aid that was supposed to be used for civilian purposes was diverted into building tunnels and obtaining weapons. How could Hamas be certain that no one involved would leak the extent of the plan to someone in Israel? How could they be certain that no UN officials administering the aid would blow the whistle? How could they be certain that some of the UN officials would gladly participate in the attack and that none of their colleagues would notice this and see a need to prevent it?

Israelis are angry that some movements noticed by low-level observers watching Gaza just prior to the assault were ignored by high-level officials. But they should be even angrier that nobody saw months earlier that a large, multi-pronged attack involving many men was being prepared.

One lesson that intelligence agencies are likely to draw from this is that they need to involve humans in the intelligence process. Electronic surveillance of Gaza could not by itself “connect the dots” of what was going on under the tunnels. Israel needed more spies on the ground and more people drawing inferences about the movements that were observable.

The pager attack

Israel’s pager attack against Hezbollah was probably the turning point in that theater of the conflict. This was also a plot that took years to plan and prepare, and that involved many people. Just one leak or slip-up would have spoiled the effort.

You do not need to plant explosives in order to use communication sabotage to wreak havoc on an enemy. Penetrating a network so that you can listen to their secrets would be powerful enough. Modern communications involves an almost unfathomable number of components, manufactured in many different places. Despite this, every military in the world has to focus on securing its own communications and hacking into the communications of its adversaries.

In war, we seem headed for increased use of drones and other small, autonomous weapons. As I have pointed out before, this will make it important to be able to secure the guidance systems for our weapons and to disrupt the guidance systems of the enemy’s weapons.

The cover-up of President Biden’s incapacity

We are learning now that President Biden’s incapacity was apparent early in his Administration and was clear to many people close to the President. Compensating for this and covering it up required considerable preparation and planning. The insiders believed that his incapacity had to be kept out of the public eye. Every time the truth threatened to leak out, they undertook an effort to crush the truth with lies.

You can say that you knew all along that something was wrong with President Biden. But it was like the story of The Emperor’s New Clothes before the kid speaks up. The emperor’s nakedness is known privately by everyone, but it is not a social fact. Mr. Biden’s entourage succeeded it keeping it from becoming a social fact, until the debate.

We live in an age of short news cycles, where the “current thing” looms large for a few days and then gets forgotten. So chances are this will soon be forgotten. But if people were to spend the next several months and years thinking about this cover-up, their anger at those involved would grow exponentially. We would be motivated to figure out what it takes to have it never happen again.

Mr. Biden’s entourage and his Cabinet evidently thought that they could run the country themselves. They acted as if their own proximity to power was more important than the danger to the country’s welfare of having a partial President. They certainly did not act as if they wanted to see Kamala Harris in charge.

For the first six months of this year, Mr. Biden’s people invited the voters to elect him for another term! How could you have the gall to do that? How could you be so irresponsible as to do that?

These people are going to get generous advances from publishers for writing their memoirs. They are going to enjoy well-paid sinecures at universities, think tanks, and television networks. Instead, they should be hiding in their homes, ashamed to show their faces anywhere. Laws should be written so that henceforth this sort of behavior is criminalized.

The press totally failed to play its watchdog role. Examine social media over the past decade. Add up the damage done by every social-media falsehood and conspiracy theory, left and right. You would not arrive at a total that comes close to matching the pollution of the pool of public knowledge emitted by the legacy press participating in the Biden Administration’s disinformation campaign.

The lesson that I draw from these three recent events is that the information space has become paramount in modern society. The ability of groups to conspire to keep secrets can have profound effects. Going forward, the question of which organizations are able to keep secrets and which organizations are able to penetrate secrecy will matter a great deal.