____________________________________________ 14 IICC Perspectives cataloged and sent to the engineering unit at Julis, where all incoming items are scanned to ensure they are not booby-trapped or rigged. After the scan, the intelligence material is transferred to CED, where the sorting begins. It's very much like triage in a hospital. The shipment is opened, and each item is diagnosed: is it a radio? A phone? A computer? A memory card? A smartwatch? A sheet of paper? A map? A passport? Cash? Each item is treated in a specific way, with priority given to what is most important and urgent. If there's a file, map, diagram or page from a notebook with information linked to a location where forces are currently maneuvering, it receives immediate priority, as it could save lives. Cases like that occurred almost daily, nearly every week. Everyone wanted to be featured in the daily reports circulated throughout the army as those who had gathered the most intelligence and done the best job. Some of the items are transferred to civilian companies which provide services beyond military capabilities, like scanning large maps. Much like a hospital X-ray department, CED has its own X-ray lab, where trained soldiers look inside phones, computers and radios to see what's there. Just a peek makes it possible to determine if the device contains something that could support actions on the ground. *** D.: "One key word I'm very proud of is proactivity. That's the difference between how CED operates today and how it functioned in the past, back when it was unclear who was responsible for processing the material and what it actually contributed to the war effort. I saw it in Operation Defensive Shield, the Second Lebanon War, Operation Cast Lead. "But now it's different, we're the ones directing forces toward CED targets. At the beginning of the ground maneuver we learned which types of targets were providing the most valuable intelligence, and we gradually began sending forces there so that we wouldn't just be a passive by-product of the maneuver, but the maneuver would go to where we sent them. "That's exactly why I got that phone call from the Chief of Staff's office. In recent months, every time a plan is approved for a given force, whether in Gaza or in Lebanon, they check with the commanders to ensure they've fully utilized all the relevant CED materials for their area of operations. "That's something we're incredibly proud of, guiding the IDF to extract intelligence through methods that aren't just cyber or special ops. That, in my view, is one of the great lessons CED is teaching us in this war, that there are other ways to reveal the enemy's secrets without necessarily investing all our energy in cyber efforts or special operations, which take a long time to plan and are extremely complex to execute."
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjgzNzA=