Netanyahu’s fears of U.S. leaks were based on his experience with the Obama administration.
Throughout Barack Obama’s two terms in
office, his administration routinely leaked information about Israel’s
operations and planned operations in Iran and in Syria. The
administration’s leaks undermined Israel’s efforts to block Iran from
acquiring nuclear weapons and endangered its bid to block Iran from
transferring advanced weapons to Hezbollah terror forces in Lebanon.
Highlights (or lowlights, as the case may
be) of the Obama administration’s leaks revolve around its successful
effort to block Israel from attacking Iran’s nuclear installation at
Fordow in 2012.
On March 29, 2012, Foreign Policy
magazine reported that Azerbaijan had agreed to permit Israel to launch
a strike against Iran’s nuclear installations from its air bases. The
same day, Bloomberg reported
on a congressional report that claimed it was futile to attack Iran’s
nuclear installations because “Iran’s nuclear installations were so
dispersed that it is unclear what the ultimate effect of a strike would
be.”
The Foreign Policy report quoted a
U.S. intelligence officer saying, “We’re watching what Iran does
closely … But we’re now watching what Israel is doing in Azerbaijan. And
we’re not happy with it.”
Israel’s veteran military affairs commentator Ron Ben-Yishai, in a column in Ynet, expressed
outrage at the U.S. leaks. Accusing Obama of “betraying Israel,”
Ben-Yishai fumed, “This ‘surgical strike’” of leaks is undertaken via
reports in the American and British media, but the campaign’s aims are
fully operational: To make it more difficult for Israeli decision-makers
to order the IDF to carry out a strike, and what’s even graver, to
erode the IDF’s capacity to launch such strike with minimal casualties.”
The leaks weren’t only geared towards
preventing an airstrike or commando raid on Iran’s installations. They
were directed as well against Israel’s efforts to undermine the Iranian
nuclear program through cyberwarfare and other forms of sabotage.
On June 1, 2012, the administration leaked the Stuxnet cyberwarfare program to the New York Times.
Stuxnet was a top-secret cyber worm developed jointly by the U.S. and
Israel. Beginning in 2010, it was used to sabotage Iran’s main
centrifuge production site at Natanz. The Times reported that
in 2012, Obama was outraged because Israel had modified the cyber worm
and allegedly sought to expand the use of the cyberweapon to other
Iranian installations including economic infrastructure.
The Times’s story quoted one of
Obama’s briefers telling the then president, “We think there was a
modification done by the Israelis.” After Obama questioned the
officials, then-Vice President Joe Biden expressed outrage. Biden
“fumed, ‘It’s got to be the Israelis. They went too far.’”
The Stuxnet leak wasn’t a one-off. Two weeks later, the administration leaked details of another joint U.S.-Israel cyber tool called “Flame,” to The Washington Post. Flame was reportedly developed for spying on Iran’s nuclear program.
The Post reported that “the
United States and Israel jointly developed a sophisticated computer
virus nicknamed Flame that collected intelligence in preparation for
cyber-sabotage aimed at slowing Iran’s ability to develop a nuclear
weapon.”
Then there was Syria. More or less at the
outset of the civil war in 2011, Israel began carrying out operations in
Syria to block Iran’s efforts to transfer advanced weapons, including
guided missiles to Hezbollah terror forces in Lebanon. Israel made it a
point never to acknowledge its operations in order to minimize pressure
on Syrian President Bashar Assad to retaliate.
Beginning in 2012, as the Obama
administration opened covert nuclear talks with Iran, Washington began
leaking information about the Israeli strikes to the media to undermine
them and deter Israel from intensifying its operation. For instance, on
July 5, 2013, the administration told the New York Times that Israel was behind a strike on a shipment of a P-800 Yakhont surface-to-sea missile system at Latakia.
In a long analysis of Obama’s Iran strategy published in 2015, former Bush National Security Council director Michael Doran argued
that Obama chose to shield Assad from efforts to overthrow him to
ingratiate himself with the Iranian regime, which, he claimed, rightly
viewed the Assad regime as an “Iranian equity.”
Israel’s relations with the U.S. reached
new lows in 2013-2015 as U.S. nuclear talks with Iran went into high
gear. The talks and the agreements they produced served to legitimize
Iran’s nuclear weapons program and ultimately provided Iran with a
windfall of cash and a glide path to a nuclear arsenal by 2025. In other
words, the nuclear talks, and the deals they produced, constituted a
strategic betrayal of Israel by the Obama administration.
In October 2022, The Wall Street Journal reported
that in 2012, while keeping Israel in the dark about his nuclear talks
with Tehran, Obama had U.S. spy agencies conduct aggressive espionage
against Israel’s military bases and eavesdropped on secret
communications by Israeli leaders to prevent Netanyahu from ordering a
military assault on the Fordo installation in Iran.
Currently, the Biden administration is
deploying a second naval carrier group to the region amid growing fears
in Washington that Israel may strike Iran’s nuclear installations ahead
of or in the aftermath of an Iranian strike on Israel. In a similar
fashion, Obama ordered a second U.S. aircraft carrier to the region in
2012, amid fears of an impending Israeli strike on Fordo.
In 2013, National Security Agency defector
Edward Snowden revealed that the U.S. was eavesdropping on foreign
allied leaders including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French
President François Hollande and Prime Minister Netanyahu.
Chastened, Obama pledged to end the
practice. But insofar as Israel was concerned, far from ending the
espionage, he stepped it up. In a stunning exposé in December 2015,
months after the nuclear deal was approved in Congress, the Wall Street Journal revealed the extent of NSA spying on Israel.
In its zeal to uncover Israel’s moves to
undermine the nuclear deal Obama had negotiated with Iran, Obama’s
National Security Agency intercepted communications between Israeli
officials and American Jewish leaders as well as members of Congress and
transferred the information to the White House.
The aggressive spying was illegal, because
it effectively involved spying on American citizens and lawmakers. The
unprecedented move showed that the Obama administration viewed Israel’s
determination to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons as the
major threat to its primary foreign policy goal—realigning the U.S.
towards Iran and away from Israel and the Sunni Arab states by engaging
in nuclear appeasement of Tehran.
During the Trump presidency, intelligence
cooperation between Israel and the U.S. reached unprecedented levels of
openness and intimacy. But due to his experience with the Obama-Biden
administration, when Biden entered office, Netanyahu reportedly ordered
Israel’s spy agencies to curtail intelligence sharing with their U.S.
counterparts.
This policy was abrogated during the
Bennett-Lapid government’s 17-month tenure. Acting at the urging of the
Biden administration, upon entering office in May 2021, Bennett
reinstated the intelligence sharing. And as the U.S.’s leak of Israel’s
role in Khodei’s assassination in May 2022 made clear, the Biden
administration returned the favor by reinstating Obama’s practice of
leaking Israeli operations that were believed to endanger its efforts to
appease Iran.
In all likelihood, the Al-Jarida
report was indeed false. The implications of the report—that the U.S.
would facilitate the roundup and all but certain torture and murder of
Mossad agents by the regime in Iran in the middle of a major war—are
simply too extreme to countenance. The rupture such a hostile move would
cause to U.S.-Israel intelligence ties would be too severe for even a
hostile administration to accept. Even worse from a U.S. perspective,
such a step would undermine the credibility and trustworthiness of U.S.
intelligence agencies in the eyes of partners and agents worldwide.
All the same, both the Obama-Biden and the
Biden-Harris administrations’ records of bad faith towards Israel on
issues related to Jerusalem’s efforts to block Iran from acquiring
nuclear weapons make it difficult at first blush to dismiss reports like
Al-Jarida’s as disinformation.
No comments:
Post a Comment