Day: May 20, 2024
VETERANS OF THE SPY BUSINESS like to remind people that there are friendly nations, but no friendly intelligence services.
In practical terms, that means our intelligence community shares intelligence with our close allies and even partners with their spy services when our respective interests overlap. At the same time, it also means that we spy on each other because each side never entirely trusts that the other’s intelligence is accurate or providing a full or disinterested picture.
Perhaps nowhere is this convoluted relationship better illustrated than in the intelligence ties between the United states and Israel. The two allies have a long history of intelligence cooperation that goes back to the earliest days of the Jewish state in the 1950s, when legendary CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton established close ties to the Mossad and essentially took over the Israel account.
For the past two decades in particular, the CIA and Mossad have been sharing intelligence on mutual targets like Iran and its regional proxies: Hezbollah in Lebanon, several Shiite militias in Syria and Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen. And in the wake of Hamas’ devastating Oct. 7 attack—which surprised Israeli leaders—Jerusalem and Washington signed a secret memorandum that expanded their already extensive intelligence cooperation, raising concerns among some lawmakers and human rights groups that the new arrangement is adding to the staggering civilian death toll in Gaza.
Indeed, so deep and institutionalized is the intelligence sharing between the United States and Israel that knowledgeable sources tell SpyTalk that the Mossad has maintained a discreet office behind an unmarked door inside CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
But even though U.S.and Israeli officials are loath to talk about it, the two allies also have a lengthy history of aggressively snooping on each other. In 2009, the NSA intercepted a telephone call between an Israeli influence agent and then-Rep. Jane Harman, a California Democrat with a longtime involvement in intelligence issues, in which shed said she would lobby the Justice Department to reduce espionage-related charges against two officials of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, the most powerful pro-Israel organization in Washington. In exchange for Harman’s help, sources told then-Congressional Quarterly National Security Editor Jeff Stein, the suspected Israeli agent pledged to help lobby Nancy Pelosi, then-House minority leader, to appoint Harman chair of the Intelligence Committee after the 2006 elections.
In more recent years, two former heads of FBI counterintelligence have told SpyTalk that they regularly had to call Israeli officials on the carpet in Washington and tell them to “cut the shit,” meaning to stop trying to steal American technology. To some annoyance here, Israelis also continue to invite former U.S. security officials to conferences around Tel Aviv, where they size them up as potential sources.
But the spying has gone both ways, including at the highest levels. The National Security Agency, in particular, has long trained its electronic ears and cyber apps on the Israeli leadership, a practice that has probably intensified, a source told SpyTalk, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Biden have clashed over the war in Gaza.
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