March 27, 2015
Aditya Tejas
Posted with permission from International Business Times
Posted with permission from International Business Times
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during a ceremony
at President Reuven Rivlin's residence in Jerusalem March 25,
2015.Reuters/Ammar Awad
The Israeli government’s assertion that Israel does not
spy on the United States is contradicted by secret National Security
Agency (NSA) documents, The Intercept reported on Thursday. Israel had refuted a report published
in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week, which claimed that Israel
was spying on ongoing talks for a nuclear deal with Iran. The
information was then allegedly shared with U.S. lawmakers and other
parties in order to undermine support for the deal domestically.
“We got our intelligence from other sources, not from the
United States. The instruction has been clear for decades now: you don’t
spy on the United States, directly or indirectly,” Israeli Foreign
Minister Avigdor Lieberman had said, according to
the Times of Israel. According to The Intercept, however, the recently
leaked documents show that the NSA considers Israel’s intelligence
service a “key threat” and a “hostile” player.
The NSA considered Russia and China as conducting the most
aggressive espionage against the U.S., but, “A NIE [National
Intelligence Estimate] ranked [Israel] as the third most aggressive
intelligence service against the U.S,” the report added, citing a
document. The same document shows that the CIA considers Israel a
“priority threat country,” a label also used to describe Russia, China,
Iran, Pakistan and Cuba.
U.S. intelligence services were especially concerned by
the methods used by Israeli agencies to “influence anti-regime elements
in Iran,” the Intercept report added. The State Department has
reportedly also stopped giving Israel intelligence updates on how the talks are proceeding.
The White House and President Barack Obama had declined
to comment on the spying revelations Tuesday. However, Obama's
administration has indicated that it will now reevaluate the U.S.-Israel
relationship, while Obama said that the possibility of a peace deal
between Israel and Palestine now seemed “very dim.”
White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough recently told reporters that the ongoing “occupation”
of Palestinian territories could not continue. “An occupation that has
lasted for almost 50 years must end, and the Palestinian people must
have the right to live in and govern themselves in their own sovereign
state,” he said.
Israeli spies are also alleged to have spied on U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s phone calls with Middle East leaders during a round of peace talks to broker a ceasefire between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
Israel's intelligence services are also alleged to have targeted U.S. trade and defense secrets, according to Newsweek.
“No other country close to the United States continues to
cross the line on espionage like the Israelis do,” an anonymous former
congressional staffer told the magazine, adding that the alleged
operations were much larger in scope than any of those conducted by
other allied nations, such as Germany, France, Japan or the U.K.
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