Your correspondent Mehul Srivastava (“Israel spy chief spurned attack warning”, Report, November 25) cites two factors in the failure to take the warnings of a possible Hamas raid seriously: that they came from low-ranking soldiers, and there was “cognitive dissonance” among officials, convinced that Hamas had been contained.
There is, however, another factor hinted at in the article: that many of those making the reports were women. As Liza Mundy makes clear in her recent research of women in the CIA, The Sisterhood: The Secret History of Women at the CIA, dismissive attitudes towards women involved in intelligence-gathering has at least one catastrophic precedent. Many of the CIA analysts who first noted the rise of al-Qaeda and its campaign of terror were women, whose reports were routinely downplayed in the run-up to the attacks of 9/11.
Robert A J Matthews
Didcot, Oxfordshire, UK
