Government agencies do not often acknowledge their own errors, but the CIA has done just that with the declassification of intelligence memoranda on the 1973 Arab-Israeli War.
The documents show that agency analysts, down to the last minute before the outbreak of fighting, were assuring President Nixon, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and other policymakers that Egypt and Syria were unlikely to attack Israel.
Those assessments, in the words of a CIA postmortem report from December 1973, “were — quite simply, obviously, and starkly — wrong.” Nearly 40 years later, the CIA analysts responsible for those judgments say they are still troubled by their mistakes.