The Israel Defense Forces´ military intelligence division is never in any hurry to join in with international uproar, especially when they are supposed to be at its expense. While the intelligence services of the United States and Britain are being hauled over the coals in the media and squirming in front of committees of inquiry, on the question of what exactly they knew, what they guessed and what they invested in terms of Iraq´s nonconventional capabilities in the run-up to the war, Israel´s intelligence service has enjoyed a period of relative calm. The public here has been too wrapped up in the hudna and its consequences to ask its intelligence communities similar questions.

But the honeymoon period is about to end. As the Steinitz Committee - set up by the chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Security Committee to investigate intelligence operations in Iraq - reached its critical stage, it raises a series of questions for Israel´s top security brass, which has stuck steadfastly to its opening position: the intelligence was accurate; the decisions were right and the weapons of mass destruction developed by the now deposed Iraqi president Saddam Hussein are still hidden somewhere in the desert.

The IDF, naturally, finds it convenient to highlight its successes in this affair. The questions that were put to the test before the war related not only to WMDs, but also to the U.S. decision to attack, the ultimate timing of the war, the speed with which the regime fell and more. In all of the above, the IDF´s top brass has given itself top marks.

Military intelligence gave the State of Israel something known as a "strategic warning": The U.S. will attack, will comprehensively defeat the Iraqis and will fundamentally alter regional affairs. These diagnoses (and the estimated timing of the attack) allowed the home front time to prepare itself for the scenario whereby Iraq used missiles to attack Israel.

But this is where the more problematic part begins. Military intelligence admits it had only very partial information, a fact which made it difficult to completely gauge Iraqi´s offensive ability and the level of risk to Israel. A tangible threat was identified in the aerial defense. Several months before the war began, Western intelligence agencies, including those in Israel, identified Iraqi efforts to make the old Soviet-era bombers in their possession serviceable. Suddenly, after almost a six-year hiatus in flights, they were renewed on flight paths of up to 1,000 kilometers.

Based on an analysis of the flight paths, the altitude of the planes and the information that existed on the bombs in Iraqi hands at the end of the first Gulf War, military intelligence in Israel saw the flights as an attempt to prepare an aerial attack - either conventional or not - against Israel.

Military intelligence also determined that Iraq had between two and eight mobile Scud missile launchers, some 50 Scud B missiles and a small number of chemical or biological warheads. In November 2002, the head of military intelligence, Major General Aharon Ze´evi-Farkash, announced he had no information that the launchers had been stationed in Western Iraq (the area from which missiles can reach Israel).

Military intelligence found it increasingly difficult to deal with Saddam´s intentions, considering the limitations on its ability to gathering intelligence in Iraq. Much emphasis was placed on analyzing speeches and public announcements by Iraqi leaders, and comparing them to those that preceded the 1991 war. The conclusion was that this time, Israel is not the main focus for Iraqi threats, but the bombers and missiles left over led to the decision not to discount it entirely.

When the war began, on March 20, the IDF waited a few more days before entirely writing off the threat of bombers, until the U.S. forces completely destroyed the Iraqi airfields. Simultaneously, an analysis of aerial photographs suggested several sites were being used as bases for missile launchers. Israel passed the relevant information to the Americans. Only later on was the threat of missiles completely discounted.

How do the learned assessments fit in with the embarrassing fact that, so far, no evidence of WMDs has been uncovered? The IDF merely quotes the U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld: "The fact that we haven´t found Saddam yet doesn´t mean he didn´t exist." Military intelligence remains faithful to its assessment that Iraq did possess WMDs, and put forward several possible explanations for the inability to find them: the weapons were sent to Syria before the war broke out (Israel expressed concerns on this in November 2002, and is still looking into it); the launchers and missiles were dismantled and hidden in Iraq; or Saddam decided to destroy his WMDs before the war.

Only recently, say intelligence sources, the Americans found dozens of MIG-21 fighter planes hidden in the Iraqi desert. And just four years after the first Gulf War, after Saddam´s son-in-law defected, WMDs were found hidden in a chicken coop. If Saddam had nothing to hide in the run-up to the most recent conflict, claim intelligence agents, why did he choose to challenge the Americans over weapons inspectors, eventually losing his grip on power?

A senior intelligence source told Haaretz that "the weapons exist somewhere. We were amazingly accurate in our assessment of the threat. In retrospect, I would not change a thing. If I could have given exact coordinates for the missile launchers, we would have been done with the whole story. The weapons may have been dismantled, may not be serviceable, may not be operationable - but they will be found eventually. We just have to wait patiently." (© Copyright 2003 Haaretz. 07/20/03)