Please take a moment to visit and log in at the subscriber area, and
submit your city & country location. We will use this information in
future to invite you to any events that we organize in your area.
Dear Reader:
I appear in the new film by Dinesh D'souza, 2016: Obama's America.
For a brief clip of my appearance, click here.
Yours sincerely,
Daniel Pipes
Spy
vs. Spy, America vs. Israel
Be the first of your
friends to like this.
[NRO title: "No Surprises: Israel,
America, and Spying"]
Israelis spying on Americans is in the news again: leaders of the Jewish
state just petitioned for Jonathan
Pollard's release and the Associated Press reported with alarm that U.S.
national security officials at times consider
Israel to be "a genuine counterintelligence threat." Its tone
of breathless outrage suggests: How dare they! Who do they think they are?
Antonio Prohias drew
the wordless "Spy vs. Spy" cartoon, a cold-war phenomenon, from
1961 to 1987.
|
But spying on allies is the norm, and it's a two-way street. Before
getting too worked up, Americans should realize that Washington is no
innocent. From Reagan to Obama, the U.S. government has sustained a massive
spying effort against Israel. Examples:
Itamar Rabinovich,
Israel's ambassador to Washington, who revealed U.S. taps.
|
- Yosef Amit, a former
major in Israeli military intelligence, spied for the CIA for several
years, focusing on troop movements and policies toward Lebanon and the
Palestinians, until his 1986 arrest.
- Itamar
Rabinovich, Israel's ambassador to Washington in 1993-96, revealed
that during his tenure, the U.S. government deciphered an Israeli code:
"The Americans were certainly tapping the [embassy's] regular phone
lines" and even its secure line. As a result, he says, "Every
'juicy' telegram was in danger of being leaked. We sent very few of
them. Sometimes I came to Israel to deliver reports orally."
- A mysterious submarine in Israeli
territorial waters 11 miles from Haifa in November 2004, which fled upon
discovery, turned out to be American, raising memories of the USS
Liberty's covert mission in June 1967.
- Yossi
Melman, an Israeli journalist specializing in intelligence, found
that U.S. military attachés in Tel Aviv gathered covert information;
Israeli officials, he discloses, believe the U.S. intelligence services
have been eavesdropping on conversations between key staff in Israel and
at foreign missions. U.S. spying, he concludes, has exposed
"Israel's deepest policy secrets."
- An official
history of Israel's intelligence services published in 2008 found
(as reported by Reuters) that U.S. spy agencies use the embassy in Tel
Aviv to engage in electronic eavesdropping and train embassy staff for
"methodical intelligence gathering."
- Barak Ben-Zur, a
retired Shin Bet intelligence officer, wrote in that same volume that
"The United States has been after Israel's non-conventional
capabilities and what goes on at the decision-making echelons."
- A 5,000-word secret
memorandum dated Oct. 31, 2008 (released by WikiLeaks), sent under
Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice's name, catalogues topics that State wants information on. The
very long list includes intelligence on "Israel's decision-making
process for launching military operations and determining retaliation
for terrorist attacks"; "evidence of Government of
Israel" involvement in "settlement and outpost growth" on
the West Bank; details on Israel Defense Forces operations against
Hamas, "including targeted assassinations and tactics/techniques
used by ground and air units"; and everything about information
technologies used by "government and military authorities,
intelligence and security services."
- The National Security
Agency employs large numbers of Hebrew speakers at its Fort Meade, Md.
headquarters, where they listen to intercepts of Israeli communications.
The 2009 legal problems of one of their number, Shamai
K. Leibowitz, concerning his leaking information, revealed that he
translated Hebrew-language conversations at the Israeli embassy in
Washington into English, neatly confirming Rabinovich's revelation.
Condoleezza Rice
oversaw extensive spying on Israel during her tenure as secretary of state
(2005-09).
|
Observers have drawn the obvious conclusion: Yitzhak Rabin, twice prime
minister commented, in Caroline
Glick's paraphrase, that "every few years Israel discovers another
US agent committing espionage against the state." An Israeli
counterintelligence agent notes that Americans "are trying to spy on us
all the time—every way they can." Matthew M. Aid, the American author of
Intel Wars (2012), finds that Washington "started spying on
Israel even before the state of Israel was formally founded in 1948, and
Israel has always spied on us."
Shamai K. Leibowitz,
who leaked U.S. spy information on Israel.
|
As Aid indicates, the spying is reciprocal. More: it's been routine, known
and implicitly accepted by both sides. It's also not terribly worrisome, for
these allies share much in common, from moral values to ideological enemies,
and they often work in tandem. Therefore the mutual spying has few larger
consequences.
Why then spy at all? Why not invite Israel into the Anglophone "five eyes" grouping that
promises not to spy on each other? Because Israel is at war. As Ben-Zur of
Shin Bet puts it, "At the end of the day, the United States does not
want to be surprised. Even by us." Nor, for that matter, do the Israelis
want to be surprised. Even by Americans.
So, let's be adults about this and calm down. States spy, even on allies.
That's okay.
Mr. Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org)
is president of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow
at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. © 2012 by Daniel Pipes.
All rights reserved.
Related
Topics: Israel &
Zionism, US
policy This text may be reposted or forwarded so long as it is
presented as an integral whole with complete information provided about its
author, date, place of publication, and original URL.
|
No comments:
Post a Comment