Recently, we marked the 25th anniversary of al-Qaeda’s terrorist attacks against the United States. We also marked 53 years since the Yom Kippur War and three years since the October 7 massacre and the multi-front war that followed. And very close to these traumatic anniversaries, another incident was added to this sequence, one that demands particular attention: the attempted attack on a Flydubai flight to Israel. More than 50 years after the wave of aircraft hijackings in which Israelis and Jews were a primary target, most notably the 1976 hijacking of an Air France plane to Entebbe, the threat of aviation terrorism has once again taken center stage.
The details of the incident are still under investigation, and premature conclusions should be avoided. However, it is already clear that such an attempt requires Israel’s intelligence and security community, as well as countries, airlines, and aviation security authorities around the world, to reassess their basic assumptions and threat scenarios. Against the backdrop of all these events, many are wondering: Do intelligence agencies actually internalize the lessons of the past?
9/11: The Day That Changed the World
For me, having served at the time as an intelligence aide to the Minister of Defense, 9/11 is not merely a historical date. It is a day that will remain etched in my memory.
I watched the first television reports of the plane striking the first tower from the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem. At that moment, a cabinet meeting was underway in the conference room. I updated the Minister of Defense, Benjamin “Fuad” Ben-Eliezer, who entered the meeting and reported the incident. At that point, the attack was still in its early stages, and far more remained unknown than was understood.
The meeting quickly broke up. That day, discussions continued at the Prime Minister’s Office until after midnight, as officials tried to grasp the significance of the devastating terrorist attack and its possible implications for Israel and the world.
Later that week, the Minister of Defense was scheduled to make an official visit to the United States. The visit was canceled and took place only nearly a year later. I remember how the Israeli Minister of Defense, despite being accompanied by American marshals, was required to remove his shoes and undergo screening like any other passenger.
Too Much Information, Too Little Understanding
Following the disaster, several investigative and review commissions were established in the United States. The most important was the 9/11 Commission, formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, whose final report was published in July 2004.
Alongside it, a joint inquiry was conducted by the intelligence committees of the Senate and House of Representatives, while the FBI, CIA, and other agencies carried out extensive reviews.
Despite their differences, these investigations painted a troubling picture: the central problem was not necessarily a lack of information. The information was there. There had been warnings, indications of danger, and intelligence held by different agencies. But the information was scattered, not always shared in time, not always assessed correctly, and, above all, never brought together into a single picture that could have prompted the system to act.
The big question, then, was this: How could the world’s most powerful intelligence community know so much and still be caught by surprise? To understand this, it is worth going back 60 years.
Pearl Harbor: The Signals Were Lost in the Noise
On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The attack brought the United States into World War II. In this case, too, hindsight revealed that the Americans had accumulated a wealth of information. There were indications that the situation was deteriorating and that war was approaching. What remained unclear was where and when the attack would come.
The problem was not that “the enemy had gone unnoticed.” Much had been seen, but what was observed was interpreted through the existing framework of assumptions.
These assumptions included the belief that Japan would attack somewhere else; that Pearl Harbor was too far away to be a plausible target; that a Japanese attack would be detected in time; and that the available information was insufficient to justify an extraordinary warning.
These problems were compounded by compartmentalization, power struggles, difficulties in sharing information, and gaps between naval intelligence and Army intelligence. This brings us to one of the most important concepts for understanding intelligence failures: signal versus noise. The more information a system holds, the less sufficient mere collection becomes. It must also be able to distinguish which pieces of information are meaningful “signals” and which are background noise. Sixty years after Pearl Harbor, some of these same failures would recur.
9/11: The Warning Lights Were Flashing, but the Dots Were Never Connected
On September 11, 2001, 19 al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four passenger aircraft. Three were turned into deadly weapons; aboard the fourth, passengers overpowered the hijackers and prevented an attack on another target. A total of 2,977 people were killed. But al-Qaeda did not suddenly appear on the morning of September 11.
In the years preceding the attacks, the organization had carried out terrorist strikes against American targets around the world. In 1998, Osama bin Laden issued a fatwa calling for the killing of Americans and their allies. Warnings about the organization’s intentions continued to accumulate. Some people also sounded the alarm, including senior FBI official John O’Neill, who was ultimately killed in the attack on the World Trade Center. By the summer of 2001, warning lights were flashing with increasing frequency. On August 6, President George W. Bush received an intelligence briefing titled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.”
In July, an FBI agent in Phoenix sent a memo warning of an unusual number of people from Arab countries studying at flight schools in the United States and recommending that the phenomenon be investigated. That summer, the American intelligence community detected an unusual increase in communications among al-Qaeda operatives. The CIA director at the time, George Tenet, later described a situation in which “the system was blinking red.” There was also information about two of the future hijackers, who had attended a meeting of terrorist operatives in Malaysia before entering the United States. Critical information held by the CIA was not transferred and acted upon in time in a way that would have enabled law enforcement agencies to take action against them. The warning signs were there, but no one managed to connect the dots in time.
Pieces of the Same Puzzle
The CIA focused primarily on threats outside the United States. The FBI dealt with domestic security and investigations within the country. Alongside them operated the NSA, immigration authorities, aviation authorities, and many other agencies. Each held a piece of the puzzle. But al-Qaeda did not recognize these organizational boundaries. It was simultaneously an external and an internal threat: terrorists who moved between countries, trained outside the United States, infiltrated the country, and operated from within it. The system struggled to connect these worlds.
The reasons went beyond ego and power struggles. Agencies differed in their missions, organizational cultures, authorities, and legal constraints. Their information systems did not always “talk” to one another, and a culture of “information fiefdoms” prevailed. Many people knew something, but few, if any, saw the whole picture. To paraphrase the Israeli intelligence failure on the eve of the Yom Kippur War: they knew a great deal, but understood very little.
Many warning signs had also accumulated in Israel in the lead-up to 1973. There, too, the prevailing framework of assumptions influenced how information was interpreted. This leads to the first lesson: information is not intelligence. Intelligence emerges when information is connected to context, meaning, and an assessment that leads to action.
Failure of Imagination
One of the key concepts to emerge from the findings of the 9/11 Commission was “Failure of Imagination.” This does not mean that no one had ever considered the possibility of using an aircraft to carry out a terrorist attack. The possibility had appeared in various forms in intelligence materials and earlier scenarios. The failure lay in the system’s inability to turn that possibility into a central, credible scenario requiring serious preparations.
This is a fundamental lesson for every intelligence professional: it is not enough to ask what the enemy did yesterday. We must ask what it is capable of doing tomorrow. One of the most dangerous assumptions is: “If it hasn’t happened before, it probably won’t happen.”
Al-Qaeda did not invent the idea of turning an aircraft into a weapon. Japanese kamikaze pilots had done so decades earlier. The 9/11 terrorists took a civilian system, a passenger aircraft loaded with fuel, and turned it into a human-guided missile. The same principle remains relevant today, with drones, cyber capabilities, artificial intelligence, and other civilian and technological means that can be repurposed for hostile use. The enemy is not bound by the patterns we know. Egypt demonstrated this in 1973, al-Qaeda in 2001, and Hamas in 2023.
The Americans understood that the solution was not simply “more intelligence.” If the system could not connect the dots, the system itself had to change. Following 9/11, significant structural reforms were implemented. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) was established to strengthen coordination and management across the intelligence community and provide the president with an integrated picture. The National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) was also established to consolidate and integrate terrorism-related information and develop a system-wide perspective. Alongside these initiatives, the Department of Homeland Security was established in 2002, transforming the structure of responsibility for domestic security in the United States. The idea was simple: if the pieces of the puzzle are scattered across different rooms, a mechanism must be created to compel the system to assemble them into a single picture.
Today, however, the problem is even more difficult. In 2001, the challenge involved large amounts of information. In 2026, the volumes are enormous: communications, social media, imagery intelligence, cyber data, databases, sensors, and open and covert sources. The problem is no longer just collection, but distillation: finding anomalies amid a sea of data; identifying the signal within the noise; connecting several indicators, each of which appears meaningless on its own, but which together tell an entirely different story.
Today’s intelligence analyst therefore cannot ask only, “What do we know?” The analyst must also ask: What are we seeing that we still do not understand? And, more importantly, what don’t we know? This may be the most important fundamental principle of all: we can never know everything. This is also the source of the humility and intellectual modesty required in intelligence work. We must not fall in love with our assumptions. We must not ignore contradictory information simply because it does not fit the picture we have constructed. We must encourage dissenting opinions, listen to those who sound the alarm, and share information with everyone who needs it.
From Pearl Harbor to October 7
It is difficult to ignore the similarities between some of the lessons drawn by the Americans and the questions that have preoccupied Israel since October 7, 2023. This does not mean the events are identical. They are not. But the human and organizational mechanisms that make strategic surprise possible recur time and again: assumptions that harden into established paradigms, warning signs that are not given the weight they deserve, information that fails to come together, warnings that do not succeed in challenging the prevailing perception, and the gap between “knowing” and “understanding.”
The lesson from Pearl Harbor, the Yom Kippur War, 9/11, and October 7 is therefore not that every attack must be predicted. No intelligence system is capable of that. The lesson is that a good intelligence system must build in mechanisms that challenge its own assumptions.
This is also the context in which the attempted attack on a Flydubai flight to Israel should be considered. At this stage, many details remain unknown, and we must await the findings of the investigation and avoid drawing firm conclusions about the planning, target, and method of operation. However, if it emerges that an attack against a passenger aircraft, or using one, was indeed planned, this would constitute a significant warning for Israel and the global aviation industry as a whole.
The Bottom Line
Israel itself was once a pioneer in drawing lessons from aviation terrorism. Following the wave of attacks and aircraft hijackings in the late 1960s and 1970s, layers of security were developed and strengthened, ranging from armed security personnel and passenger and baggage screening to cockpit protection. After 9/11, additional layers of security were adopted worldwide, and procedures were tightened.
But history teaches us that the enemy looks precisely for the point at which the system has stopped expecting an attack. We must therefore go beyond asking how the latest attempt was thwarted. We must ask now: What will the next attempt look like? Which vulnerabilities in the civilian aviation system might a terrorist actor exploit?
Are we protecting the system against yesterday’s threat, or tomorrow’s as well? The surprise we see but fail to understand. Small cells and lone attackers operate alongside large organizations. Civilian technologies are becoming more accessible and affordable. Drones, artificial intelligence, cyber capabilities, and autonomous systems create new opportunities, including for those seeking to cause harm. We must therefore never build security systems solely around threats we already know. An intelligence community must also try to identify threats it cannot yet imagine. Twenty-five years after 9/11, the big question is not how much information we possess. It is whether we know how to identify what matters in everything we know.
Can we distinguish between signal and noise? Are we willing to listen to information that contradicts our beliefs? And does the system have people capable of connecting all the dots in time, and translating that understanding into action? Because the next intelligence failure will not necessarily occur because information was unavailable.
It may happen precisely because there were too many dots, too much information, and too much noise, and too few people who managed to see, in time, the picture hidden behind them. Because sometimes the greatest surprise is not what we failed to see, but what we saw and failed to understand.
