Connecting The Dots By Malcolm Gladwell Summary

Probabilistic reasoning is difficult. People prefer to reject ambiguity and demand that concrete predictions be made. However, intelligence is inherently ambiguous. In intelligence forecasting, it is difficult to determine what information constitutes a signal, and what constitutes noise. In “Connecting the Dots: The Paradoxes of Intelligence Reform”, Malcolm Gladwell analyzes several high-profile “intelligence failures”, such as the Yom Kippur War, September 11th, Pearl Harbor, and the Bay of Pigs fiasco, as well as several psychological studies, and comes to the conclusion that: (1) there is no such thing as a perfect intelligence system - all systems require tradeoffs; (2) failures do not constitute the limitations of the intelligence community,

but rather the limitations of intelligence itself; and (3) scattered pieces of information rarely tell a coherent story until after an event has occurred.
The first case Gladwell analyzes is the failure of Israeli military intelligence in anticipating the attacks that started the Yom Kippur War. Despite a plethora of evidence, the Israeli military was caught unaware when the forces of Egypt and Syria attacked on the afternoon of October 6, 1973. Why was AMAN, the Israeli military intelligence agency, unable to anticipate the threat? In hindsight, the attacks look obvious; the Syrian and Egyptian forces were mobilized and moving into offensive positions, Soviet advisers and their families had left the area, and at 4 o’clock in the morning on the day of the attack the country’s most trusted intelligence source informed AMAN that an attack would occur later that day. However, as Gladwell points out, if the narrative begins several years before the Yom Kippur War and the intelligence is laid out in the same order that Israeli intelligence was provided with it, a different story emerges.
In 2003, many people were performing the same type of post-mortem analysis that occurred after the Yom Kippur War on the failures of U.S.

intelligence agencies in anticipating the events of September 11th. Journalists and politicians alike analyzed events of the decades preceding the September 11th attacks and came to the conclusion that there was a clear and recurring pattern of events that was overlooked by the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. In their book “The Cell”, authors John Miller, Michael Stone, and Chris Mitchell connect a series of dots, including the murder of a rabbi in 1990, an assassination plot against the pope, and the detonation of a cargo truck in Nairobi, to indicate the failures of US intelligence agencies in understanding the threat Al Qaeda posed. One of the key facts the authors pointed out was an exchange between Italian intelligence and a member of Al Qaeda, where the informant told the agents, regarding a terrorist plot, “It is something terrifying that goes from south to north, east to west. The person who devised this plan is a madman, but a genius. He will leave them frozen [in shock].” The authors determine that this is clearly a reference to the September 11th attacks. Gladwell pushes back, arguing that this hardly a forecast - barely any usable intelligence is provided. While the authors of “The Cell” believe they have unambiguously fit the pieces of puzzle together, in the real world, intelligence is ambiguous. As Gladwell states, this information

did not form a pattern, but a Rorschach test. Given disparate pieces of information, you can interpret the meaning in any number of ways - only when you’re informed of what the picture is, does it become obvious.
Additionally, people exhibit a tendency to revise their judgement of events and the probability of their occurrence after the fact. Gladwell references the study done by psychologist Baruch Fischhoff, in which subjects were asked to give an estimate of the probability of Nixon’s trip to China prompting a series of diplomatic events. As we now know, Nixon’s trip to China was viewed as a diplomatic success. Fischhoff brought his subjects back in, and had them recall their initial predictions. The final results of the study showed that when people were asked to recall their estimates of the different outcomes, they overwhelmingly remembered having provided more accurate predictions than they actually had. This phenomenon is called “creeping determinism” - that is, human beings tend to view events that occur as having been inevitable when looking through the lens of hindsight.
Using the work of Stanford psychologist David Rosenhan, Gladwell further argues that in an attempt to solve on kind of intelligence problem, we often create another.

One of the main failures of law enforcement and intelligence agencies identified by both the authors of “The Cell” and Senator Richard Shelby was that the F.B.I. and C.I.A. acted in competition with one another to produce results, as opposed to in centralized collaboration. Gladwell points out that the intelligence community was structured in this manner in response to the failures of the Bay of Pigs operation, which had been based on highly centralized intelligence gathering. In turn, the structure of intelligence agencies at the time of the Bay of Pigs was in response to the failure of decentralized intelligence to identify the threat of an attack on Pearl Harbor. The iterative cycle of intelligence failures and subsequent reform efforts ignores the premise that the failures do not represent evidence of the limitations of intelligence agencies, but rather the limitations of intelligence itself. As Gladwell states, “in our zeal to correct what we believe to be the problems of the past, we end up creating new problems for the

future”.