Military Intelligence Decision-Making Process

That is the fact. The intelligence officer gets out of bed,

goes to the phone,

reads the message,

understands

that the word "routine"

appears there several times,

understands there is no time urgency and that additional situation assessments will take place

during the day,

and makes a professional decision

not to wake me, meaning that the prime minister did not

need to know about it at that moment.

Were there such cases in the past, when similar information

was received and you were not woken, nor was the prime minister?

I asked that.

After all, I know when they woke me, not when they did not wake me, and I asked.

Certainly there were.

My intelligence personnel and my operations personnel

received, from time to time,

information, a document. Sometimes

they thought they needed to wake me,

update me, and sometimes not. It depends on the urgency,

the quality of the information,

its content, and here a professional decision was made

by an intelligence officer not

to do so.

There is an accusation against the IDF chief of staff and the Shin Bet chief that they did not call the prime

minister at night. Is it even customary for them to call him?

The IDF chief of staff and the Shin Bet chief do not call the prime minister directly.

A. They don't call. B. It's also improper for them to call.

There is a proper way for a prime

minister to deal with the heads of the organizations. That's what the military secretariat is for.

That's what the military secretary is for. When the head of the Shin Bet, the head of the Mossad,

or the IDF chief of staff want to speak with the prime minister,

there is one point of contact for that: the military secretary,

the Office of the Military Secretariat.

Not directly.

Let's move on. Just before four a.m., your intelligence officer receives the

information and doesn't wake you.

Yet you do wake up.

I

wake up

from a phone call from the chief of staff to the head

of the Shin Bet.

When?

At 6:12 a.m.

What does he tell you?

He wakes me up.

He tells me, "I need you on the red phone."

I ask him—we're talking on a WhatsApp call.

I ask him,

"Can't we talk here?"

He tells me, "No."

And I remember asking him one more question. "In what context?"

And he answers me with one word: "South."

I told him, "Got it." I go down to the red phone. It's on another floor.

Four minutes pass. Five minutes.

So it's six...

6:17 a.m.

And we're talking on the red phone.

What does he tell you?

He informs me, he updates me that during the night there are signs

of suspicious SIM cards,

senior officials going underground, and a few other things, but on their side, there are

also signs that we call cooling indicators, or reassuring signs, indicating that this isn't the case,

including that it was done before during an exercise.