‘Golden’ intelligence not always the smartest basis for military action
I was on the staff of a senior army officer when he received a briefing on operations in Timor in which the commander kept talking about the “intelligence-led” operations he was conducting.
My general, a Vietnam veteran, stopped him after not too long and asked rather pointedly: “What other kind of operations are there?”
The general was telling the officer rather directly that intelligence should be fundamental to all military operations, rather than something special.
Yet that intelligence needs to be well derived and depoliticised – otherwise the results can be tragic.
The Iraqi asylum-seeker known as Curveball, for instance, became the basis for spurious claims regarding Iraq’s development of weapons of mass destruction. This information was in turn used to justify the ruinous invasion of Iraq.
As a result, the world should be very cautious of accepting claims made by political leaders to justify military action.
As the Middle East has entered yet another war of choice and stands on the brink of something much bigger, it is appropriate to critically examine the basis on which Israel has launched its strikes and desperately sought to enmesh Washington in its project.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed variously that Israel was under imminent threat of nuclear attack and that Israel had targeted Iranian scientists working on their nuclear bomb and, in another US television interview, claimed they “were basically Hitler’s nuclear team”.
Reports began to emerge that Netanyahu had been briefed on so-called golden information that indicated Iran was weeks away from assembling a bomb and could be even closer.
Israel’s target selection during its six days of operations is also indicative of a much broader strategy than simply degrading Iran’s nuclear capability.
Israel’s publicly avowed reasons for bombing Iran seem greatly at odds with non-Israeli assessments of Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
The director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency in an interview with CNN, for example, said the agency believed that “we did not have any proof of a systematic effort to move into a nuclear weapon”.
Perhaps more pointedly, the US intelligence community’s assessment at the end of March 2025, as relayed by Donald Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, to the Senate intelligence committee, concluded that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon, nor had the Supreme Leader reauthorised the dormant weapons program even though it had enriched uranium to higher levels.
The disconnect between what the Israeli government has claimed and what the US intelligence agencies assessed has not been lost on the press. On his return ahead of schedule from the G7 meeting in Canada, the US President, faced with a question regarding the difference between the US and the Israeli intelligence assessments, said of Gabbard’s testimony that “I don’t care what she said”.
Even by the standard of Trump’s normal commentary, such an offhand comment about his own intelligence community’s assessment regarding the most pressing security issue of the time should not only be concerning to the public at large, but also to the wider intelligence community.
The world is waiting to know whether Washington will join in the Israeli attacks on Iran, or whether the deployment of military assets is part of the Trump administration’s broader plan as leverage to get Iran to agree to the deal that it is offering.
That infers a coherent set of options being developed, which one could be confident was occurring if there were some coherence about the intelligence assessments being made.
When such serious military action is being considered, it is beholden on decision-makers to question the intelligence being offered to them, particularly when that intelligence may be contradictory.
Military commanders know that accurate intelligence is the basis of successful military operations. But for politicians who are ultimately responsible for the decision to unleash that military force, intelligence can at various times represent either an inconvenient truth, or a justification for the appropriate use of force.
It is hard to get away from the notion that the IAEA and his own intelligence community are telling Trump an inconvenient truth, while Netanyahu’s golden information is looking more and more like fool’s gold.
Dr Rodger Shanahan is a Middle East analyst, former army officer and author.
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