Israeli Spies Always With Us
By Jeff Stein from The Washington Post
March 25, 2010 "Washington Post" Mar. 24, 2010 - -Another big week for Israeli spies – new and old.
In the latest chapter of the Dubai assassination drama, Britain gave the boot Tuesday to an Israeli diplomat, asserting that Israel was involved in the forgery of U.K. passports used in the January killing of a senior Hamas operative.
Meanwhile, declassified FBI documents from a 25-year-old Israeli spy scandal here surfaced on the Internet.
Lest one think the Israelis might lay low for awhile, a defiant Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu delivered a fiery speech in Washington Tuesday to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the same powerful group implicated in that long-ago spy scandal.
Odd, for a business that’s supposed to stay out of the news. Then again, that’s been the fate of spy services in recent years. A lot of what they do, from espionage and bribery to counterterrorism and hacking into computers, has ended up on the front page.
So it was in London Tuesday, when Her Majesty's Government concluded “there are compelling reasons to believe that Israel was responsible for the misuse of the British passports," in the words of Foreign Secretary David Miliband.
As a consequence, Britain ordered the expulsion of an unidentified Israeli diplomat after concluding that the high-quality fakes used in the Dubai hit were almost certainly “made by a state intelligence service.”
“The actions in this case are completely unacceptable," Miliband said, "and they must stop.”
Spy flaps are to foreign relations as insider trading is to Wall Street – mother’s milk, sometimes spilled. And, like every other secret service, Israel’s Mossad is not going to stop doing what it was designed for -- to neutralize its enemies with whatever it takes, from car bombs and silencer-equipped pistols to – in the latest flap – muscle relaxants and a pillow, allegedly the weapons of choice against the Hamas military commander in Dubai. Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was wanted by Israel for his role in the slayings of two of its soldiers in the 1980s.
But another of Mossad’s reason for being, as with all the world's spy services, is to make sure friends are really friends.
And judging by once sensitive FBI documents making the rounds in recent days, the Israelis have been at this task in Washington for a very long time.
The 21 documents, obtained by Grant F. Smith, a Washington, D.C. author who has made a career out of writing critical books on Israeli spying and lobbying, detail the FBI’s investigation into the theft of a confidential U.S. document on the Reagan administration’s position going into the 1984 U.S.-Israel Free Trade Area Negotiations.
Acting on a complaint that the document was circulating on Capitol Hill, the FBI discovered that an Israeli diplomat had acquired the paper and given it to officials at AIPAC, the lobbying group whose annual convention drew both Netanyahu and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton this week.
Although the document was classified only “confidential” (as opposed to Secret, Top Secret and higher), the FBI concluded that President Reagan’s “negotiating position concerning a trade agreement between the United States and the State of Israel is compromised because this report divulges those products and industries that have been identified by the International Trade Commission as being the most sensitive to imports from Israel."
Israeli Intelligence, Our Constant Companion
Israeli Spying in the United States
By CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM from Counterpunch
Scratch a counterintelligence officer in the U.S. government and they'll tell you that Israel is not a friend to the United States.
This is because Israel runs one of the most aggressive and damaging espionage networks targeting the U.S..
The fact of Israeli penetration into the country is not a subject oft-discussed in the media or in the circles of governance, due to the extreme sensitivity of the U.S.-Israel relationship coupled with the burden of the Israel lobby, which punishes legislators who dare to criticize the Jewish state. The void where the facts should sit is filled instead with the hallucinations of conspiracy theory -- the kind in which, for example, agents of the Mossad, Israel’s top intelligence agency, engineer the 9/11 attacks, while 4,000 Israelis in the Twin Towers somehow all get word to escape before the planes hit. The effect, as disturbing as it is ironic, is that the less the truth is addressed, the more noxious the falsity that spreads.
Israel's spying on the U.S., however, is a matter of public record, and neither conspiracy nor theory is needed to present the evidence. When the FBI produces its annual report to Congress concerning "Foreign Economic Collection and Industrial Espionage," Israel and its intelligence services often feature prominently as a threat second only to China. In 2005 the FBI noted, for example, that Israel maintains "an active program to gather proprietary information within the United States." A key Israeli method, said the FBI report, is computer intrusion. In 1996, the Defense Intelligence Service, a branch of the Pentagon, issued a warning that "the collection of scientific intelligence in the United States [is] the third highest priority of Israeli Intelligence after information on its Arab neighbors and information on secret U.S. policies or decisions relating to Israel."
In 1979, the Central Intelligence Agency produced a scathing survey of Israeli intelligence activities that targeted the U.S. government. Like any worthy spy service, Israeli intelligence early on employed wiretaps as an effective tool, according to the CIA report. In 1954, the U.S. Ambassador in Tel Aviv discovered in his office a hidden microphone "planted by the Israelis," and two years later telephone taps were found in the residence of the U.S. military attaché. In a telegram to Washington, the ambassador at the time cabled a warning: "Department must assume that all conversations [in] my office are known to the Israelis." The former ambassador to Qatar, Andrew Killgore, who also served as a foreign officer in Jerusalem and Beirut, told me Israeli taps of U.S. missions and embassies in the Middle East were part of a "standard operating procedure."
Full-Spectrum Penetration