We never expected that – a corporative study of failures in national and business intelligence by Avner Barnea

For JISIB Barnea has previously written about competitive intelligence in Israel (2016), about Israeli start-ups in cyber security (2018), and about how AI will change intelligence and decision-making (2020). The book, We never expected that – A corporative study of failures in national and business intelligence, is not on Israeli intelligence per se. Still, the best documented of the four cases presented come from the First Intifada in 1993 when Barnea was well situated to observe what was going on behind the scenes. For 27 years, until 1997, he was the Senior Official for Intelligence in the Prime Minister’s office. Since then, he has been a competitive intelligence consultant, a teacher and student of intelligence studies and sine 2016 a research fellow at the National Security Studies Center, NSSC. The book, which is a translation of a book in Hebrew, which again builds on the author’s PhD thesis, proposes an analysis of a series of intelligence failures. To study failures is a good way to learn. It is a good methodology, maybe the best. To present a book with both government and state failures is also a good idea from the perspective that there are bound to be fruitful parallels. So far so good.