SAEDNEWS: Abbas Abdi criticizes Iran’s security structure, blaming its focus on minor details and lack of strategic analysis for its failure to foresee the recent incursion.
According to Saed News, Abbas Abdi, in an opinion piece titled “The Intelligence Apparatus” published in Etemad newspaper, wrote:
Twenty months ago, I penned a commentary criticizing the interview of Parviz Sabeti, the highest-ranking official of SAVAK, under the title “Security Institution or Intelligence Institution?” In that piece, I explained that SAVAK was a security body, not an intelligence one. Proving this was not difficult: there is no accessible internal, scientific, strategic, or forward-looking report from that vast organization—no document that analyzes and forecasts the prevailing trends in that system. But there is an abundance of trivial or low-value information, such as who said what in a certain meeting. An agent named “Saturday” would comment on it, an officer named “Sunday” would analyze or reject it, and finally, an official called “Friday” would issue orders for further surveillance and monitoring. Yet there was not a single line of sociological or political analysis about the future trajectory of that society. Their main tasks were overseeing two or three newspapers and approving or rejecting their headlines. They targeted writers and students, focusing all their energy on suppressing clandestine armed movements.
When they succeeded in this mission, they breathed a sigh of relief, as if they had moved Mount Damavand, and became overconfident. Yet two years later, they packed their suitcases—along with the entire regime—and left the country. A more famous example than SAVAK is the Stasi, the East German security service, which monitored virtually the entire East German population with extreme precision but could not foresee its own downfall or the collapse of the Berlin Wall. This is vividly depicted in the remarkable book The Autumn of the Fall.
In that earlier article, I explained that an intelligence institution is not primarily obsessed with gathering secret information, wiretapping, or similar activities. Even in religious literature, such behavior is discouraged—not only for ethical reasons but because it distracts and distorts the mind. Consider the tales of people who learned the language of animals and ended up suffering great harm. In truth, if we had the ears to hear conversations dozens of meters away, the sight to see through walls, the smell of a bloodhound or a polar bear, the vision of an eagle, the hearing of an owl, or the touch of an elephant, life would become unbearably difficult. Today, technology allows us to possess all of these abilities and more. Imagine if mind-reading were possible—countless fleeting thoughts we have about each other would turn the world into a living hell if others could read them. This is the catastrophic mindset of security systems that chase after such capabilities. In the end, they become like an astronomer scanning the skies for stars while remaining oblivious to the room next door.
The expectation is that Iran’s security agencies should have foreseen Israel’s recent incursion, including its scope and methods. Surely they knew which forces and capabilities would be involved. Some may ask why ordinary people could not predict such an event. First, some individuals were indeed convinced it would happen, which was their analytical assessment. But when it comes to detailed knowledge, we cannot expect ordinary citizens to have it, since they cannot continuously track all the news. By “news” I mean open-source, accessible, and seemingly ordinary information—things that may appear insignificant to us but are highly meaningful to an intelligence service. Therefore, without doubt, the biggest criticism of Iran’s political system in the recent incursion is its intelligence weakness.
Why have we reached this point? Here are several brief reasons:
First and most important: Intelligence agencies must have a degree of operational independence. Four months ago, the U.S. intelligence community reported that Iran is not building nuclear weapons and that the program had stopped in 2003 and has not been authorized by the leadership since. This report was released when the U.S. and Israel had already decided to finalize their plan to attack Iran. Yet these intelligence bodies, because they had sufficient independence, published their findings. After the incursion began, when Trump was asked about it, he rejected the report and instead cited his own unfounded views on Iran. This might seem like a weakness—that they contradicted the head of state—but in reality, it is their strength.
Second: We must distinguish between strategic, macro-level analysis and trivial, operational matters. A strong intelligence service often derives its data from open sources, verifies it, and then uses it. Macro analysis is critical, and it is shaped largely by open information—classified data has limited value. Therefore, maximum quality and importance should be given to strategic, big-picture assessments.
Third: Issues must be prioritized. The country’s vital matters should be in the top tier, with war among them. Obsessing over minor matters outside the agency’s real duties only leads to exhaustion and distraction. If an intelligence service spends its time reading newspapers and websites, ordering headline deletions, it shows that—whether or not these actions are correct—it does not understand its own importance, much like using a supercomputer for basic arithmetic. Over time, these minor tasks become the institution’s primary mission, pushing aside its real objectives.
Fourth: Staffing in any intelligence organization requires a high level of expertise and knowledge. Incompetent and poorly educated individuals tend to gravitate toward pseudoscience and oversimplification, pushing for duties they can handle. Experienced experts will not accept responsibility without independence of judgment.
Fifth: One of the most important features of an intelligence body is evaluating performance and testing its own analyses. This applies to all fields, but for intelligence it is crucial. Decades ago in the U.S., when a survey’s results turned out to be wildly inaccurate, the entire polling system was reviewed to identify flaws. Intelligence reporting should be subject to the same principle. You cannot fire arrows first and then draw the targets around them afterward.
By these criteria, what happened during the recent incursion into Iran was neither unnatural nor unexpected.
To appreciate the significance of this, consider the following excerpt from page 163 of How Dictators Fall and Nations Survive, which is also relevant to the Iran–Iraq War:
“In the 1980s, Saddam Hussein was engaged in a brutal war with Iran. This war was extremely difficult for Iraqi soldiers; generals were paralyzed by fear, and Saddam micromanaged military strategy—down to ordering how big the trenches should be. Moreover, the Iraqi regime had almost no accurate intelligence on Iran, because most of the country’s intelligence apparatus was busy spying on ordinary citizens and the army itself. The focus on internal enemies was so great that, on the eve of war, the Iraqi intelligence service had only three officers tasked with gathering and analyzing information about Iran—and only one of them spoke Persian. This is a classic example of an army rendered ineffective in battle due to coup-proofing measures, as it was not designed for actual warfare.
But over time, Saddam’s calculations changed. Before the war, he saw Iraq’s army as a bigger threat to his rule than Iran’s army. Yet when Iran gained the upper hand and even put Baghdad within range, Saddam changed his view. According to analyses based on the memoirs of an Iraqi general: ‘Competent, professional officers were never favored by Saddam, even when their presence was vital. But as the war dragged on, he increasingly realized he needed them and, in most cases, listened to their advice. Even the country’s intelligence structure was transformed. Whereas before almost no one was assigned to gather intelligence on Iran, by the final year of the war more than 2,500 people were engaged in producing and analyzing intelligence on Iran.’”
