Martin van Creveld: Scientist, Journalists, Spies

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Here is a story I heard many years ago. Someone once asked US President Lyndon Johnson how important the various intelligence agencies - of which the USA has many - were for his work. His answer? I have never heard anything from the intelligence agents that I couldn't also read in the New York Times the next day. And there is a reason for that, Johnson should have added. Intelligence agents are experts at collecting information. The same goes for journalists. The difference is that the latter usually do a better job.

The story may be true or not. Assuming it is, Johnson may have meant what he said. Or he may have deliberately downplayed the role of intelligence services to hide that he knew more; After all, it was said to be one of his outstanding qualities to disguise himself. I can think of a few other interpretations. Regardless. We will probably never know.

Why this story? Because some time ago, I had the privilege of giving a lecture in Jerusalem. My topic was: "What became of the Iranian threat?". A true puzzle, given the countless occasions when Prime Minister Netanyahu drew attention to it; not to mention his repeated threats to bomb Iran to prevent it from building a bomb.I took the opportunity to argue, as I have done many times before, that the nuclear threat posed by Iran to my country was largely a myth. I did not have to wait for Q&A during my lecture to know what was going on in the minds of my audience - I have experienced this situation many times before. As a scientist, do you have access to intelligence information? No, I do not (and I don't think I want to; Access to such information creates its own limitations and constraints). How do you know then what you claim to know? A good question; and one that I will address here.

First: I do not claim to know anywhere near as much about how many centrifuges Iran possesses, where they are located, the depth at which they are hidden under cement, how much enriched uranium the country has produced, etc. as the intelligence services do. I mainly rely on journalists, who themselves get a lot of their information from spies, who in turn have their own agenda when they publish something at a particular time and in a certain format.

Second: Such information - no matter how accurate it may be - is, on its own, meaningless. To understand it, one must first answer more far-reaching questions. Such as those about the origins of Iran's behavior; About its goals; And about its constraints. In short, questions about its national strategy and the role its nuclear program plays in that strategy. In relation to these matters, the information available to scientists is often just as good as, if not better than, that of the spies or journalists.

Third: When it comes to more general questions, such as the effects of nuclear weapons on international relations, deterrence, arms races, and so on, scientists are partly better informed than spies or journalists. Because members of these two professions rarely have the time to delve as deeply into such issues as they should.Fourth: Spies and the agencies they work for are often under political pressure to tell decision-makers what they want to hear. An outstanding, indeed, outrageous, example of this was the Clinton and Bush administrations' attempt to "prove" that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. They did everything, invented stories! From mobile labs to produce germs and God knows what else. I once had the pleasure of spending an hour with Hans Blix, the UN representative and head of the team tasked with finding the weapons. He told me, as he has told others, how the Americans did it. Scientists working in an academic environment are much less likely to be under such pressure.

In short, spies have their advantages. They are a necessity for any government, the military, and even large corporations. But they cannot act independently. The intelligence services themselves partly know this. Why else would they recruit, train, and deploy both "analysts" and "collectors"?

I have experienced this myself. Over the years, I have attended numerous meetings with intelligence officials and journalists from around the world. Some of them visited me in my hometown near Jerusalem just to discuss certain topics with me. Including events in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq. I have expressed my surprise time and time again that they, who had been in those countries, visited me, who had not. The answer I received was always the same: You can explain to us what we saw, heard, and experienced by explaining the context to us.

To that, I can only say "Amen."

MARTIN VAN CREVELD, one of the leading military historians of the present day, was born in Holland in 1946. He has been living in Israel since 1950. He studied at the London School of Economics and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he has been a professor of history since 1971. Books include: "Fighting Power", "Faces of War", "The Sword and the Olive", "Rise and Decline of the State",... He also works as a military advisor and lecturer in the entire Western world.

Martin van Creveld on the Internet: www.martin-van-creveld.com

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