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.
In the Beginning
In the late 1950s, the CIA flew U2 spy planes over Dimona, the isolated Negev Desert site of Israel's nuclear reactor, to determine if it was really designed only for peaceful purposes, as the Israelis claimed. After also secretly sending operatives to test the soil around Dimona for weapons-grade levels of radioactivity, the CIA estimated in 1960 that the reactor was "intended for the production of weapons-grade plutonium". A year later, the CIA predicted Israel would be in a position to "produce sufficient weapons grade plutonium for one or two crude weapons a year by 1965-66".
The CIA's intelligence estimates on Israel's nuclear program turned out to be accurate. In 1969, Prime Minister Golda Meir confessed to President Richard Nixon that Israel indeed had developed nuclear weapons, but fearing a Middle East nuclear arms race, the two leaders agreed to keep the Israeli bomb an official secret, a policy that both countries still maintain despite the expert opinion that Israel today has amassed an arsenal of some 90 nuclear weapons, as well as a triad of ballistic missiles, warplanes and submarines to deliver them.
One of the ugliest chapters of the U.S-Israel spy wars was the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, a NSA spy ship that was monitoring Israeli communications during the 1967 Middle East war from international waters in the Mediterranean off the northern coast of Egypt's Sinai peninsula. On June 8, 1967, Israeli warplanes repeatedly strafed the Liberty with cannon fire and set it aflame with napalm bombs before an Israeli torpedo tore a 39-foot hole in its starboard hull. The attack killed 33 U.S. sailors and one NSA civilian, wounded 117 others, and severely damaged the ship, which miraculously managed to limp to safety in Malta.
Israel later apologized for the attack, claiming it had mistaken the Liberty for an enemy Egyptian ship, and paid $13 million (the equivalent of $82 million today) in compensation to the victims' families and for material damage to the vessel. But some critics believe Israel intentionally attacked the Liberty to prevent U.S. eavesdroppers from learning of Israel's plans to seize Syria's Golan Heights.
The most treacherous episode in the spy vs. spy rivalry between Israel and the United States was the Pollard affair. In 1987, Jonathan Pollard, a U.S. Naval intelligence analyst was convicted of spying for Israel, becoming the first American to go to jail for life for passing secrets to a U.S. ally. The top-secret intelligence Pollard provided to Israel was so vast and damaging that the complete list of files remains highly classified to this day. After serving 30 years in prison, he was paroled in 2015 and quickly emigrated to Israel, where he was hailed as a hero. Pollard remains one of the most damaging spies in U.S. history.
These days, former security officials say, the United States and Israel spy on each other using mostly electronic means. That puts the Hebrew linguists at the National Security Agency and the FBI on the front lines of the U.S. espionage mission to learn what Israel isn't sharing with its American counterparts.
"Yes, we tap and monitor the world, including the GOI, the Mossad, Shin Bet and the IDF," a former high-ranking State Department official with extensive contacts in the military and intelligence communities told SpyTalk, referring to the government of Israel, its foreign and domestic spy services, and the Israel Defense Forces. This official requested anonymity to discuss highly sensitive issues.
Another retired senior intelligence official, who also asked not to be named, said the NSA's satellites, cell phone technology and other classified systems "act like a giant giant vacuum cleaner," amassing mountains of raw intelligence from recorded phone conversations, emails, texts, photos and video from all over the world. NSA analysts then use key words to pinpoint relevant information regarding specific targets.
The first former official says the NSA has used its capability to tap supposedly secure communications lines between foreign agencies and offices and in some cases has even planted sophisticated bugs in the offices of presidents, prime ministers and foreign ministers to listen or even watch what goes on in them.
"You would be surprised how ‘secure' these people are told by their own people these phones are," this former official says. "We also now have satellites that will do this for us and give us the data almost in real time, both sound and sometimes video."
According to classified documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden in 2013, the NSA has shared some of that raw intelligence with Israel, including the names of U.S. persons, as part of their intelligence cooperation agreements. But at the same time, these leaked documents showed, the NSA cites Israel as a "priority target" for intelligence gathering, along with China, Russia, Iran and Cuba.
Tapping Leaders' Cell Phones
As far back as 2013, one high-value NSA target was Benjamin Netanyahu. Despite President Barack Obama's promise to curb U.S. eavesdropping on friendly world leaders following Snowden's leak and a revelation that the U.S.had eavesdropped on German Chancellor Angela Merkel's cell phone since 2002, the NSA continued to spy on Netanyahu because of White House concerns that he might order an Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear program without warning, a move that almost certainly would draw the United States into another Middle East war.
Though U.S. fears of a preemptive Israeli strike subsided, the NSA continued to monitor Netanyahu to learn if Israel had discovered the secret negotiations that began in 2013 between the United States and Iran for a deal that would curb the Islamic Republic's nuclear program. Sure enough, intercepted conversations between Netanyahu and his top intelligence officials confirmed that Israeli spies knew about the negotiations and later leaked details of the talks to turn Congress against the nuclear deal.
According to former U.S. counterespionage officials, Israeli spies most likely learned of the secret talks by using sophisticated electronic devices, called Stingrays, that mimic cell phone towers. Such devices, when installed on a telephone pole or on a rooftop near the White House, State Department, national security think tanks or the offices of foreign-connected lobbyists in Washington, can capture cell phone calls and even download the entire contents of a mobile phone, including emails, texts, photos and videos.
It's unclear whether the NSA has fully informed congressional oversight committees as to which foreign leaders -- if any -- it's currently targeting. Not surprisingly that's not the kind of information that the NSA or the committees share with the media. The NSA did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
One former CIA officer suggests they may have not come clean with Congress. "If it ever got back to the [congressional intelligence] oversight committees, there would be hell to pay," a former CIA case officer who served in Israel told SpyTalk. "The Israeli lobby's minions wouldn't stand for that." But this former spy added: "It would seem to be very much in the interest of U.S. national security to eavesdrop on Bibi and company, given their extremist policies which endanger the U.S."
Earlier this month, the Biden administration reportedly offered to provide Israel with intelligence on the location of wanted Hamas leaders and the tunnels under Gaza where they're hiding if Netanyahu calls off his plan to invade Rafah, the enclave's southernmost city where Israel says the last Hamas battalions are hiding amid more than a million displaced Palestinian civilians.
Asked if the administration is now using intelligence as a carrot to minimize civilian casualties, Chuck Freilich, a former Israeli deputy national security adviser, said that's not how U.S.-Israel intelligence cooperation works. "Bilateral intelligence cooperation is too deep and institutionalized, and the Biden administration too committed to eliminating both the tunnels and Hamas leaders, for this to be the case," Freilich said in an email.
But by quoting foreign reports, a time-honored method for current and former Israeli officials to avoid violating classification rules, Freilich seemed to confirm that the NSA continues to eavesdrop on Israeli officials, and that Israel's own equivalent of the NSA -- the IDF's vaunted Unit 8200 -- is well aware of such espionage.
"There have been long-standing reports of U.S. eavesdropping on Israel, including by cyber," he said. "Presumably, [defensive] measures are being taken." He refused to comment further.
SpyTalk Editor-in-chief Jeff Stein and Contributing Editor Peter Eisner contributed reporting to this story. You can hear a discussion of the US-Israeli spy wars with Jeff Stein and Jonathan Broder on the latest edition of the SpyTalk podcast, on Apple or wherever you listen
This article first appeared on Spytalk.co.
