Obama Amps Up Spying On Israel to Stop Iran Strike

http://www.frontpagemag.com/point/260655/obama-amps-spying-israel-stop-iran-strike-daniel-greenfield

“report any unusual incidents”

November 4, 2015

Daniel Greenfield

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Obviously allies do spy on each other. The US, UK and France all spy on each other. But there are varieties of espionage. Overt harassment of this kind isn't just espionage, it's a statement of hostility. It's the way the USSR treated American personnel. And it's all being done in the service of protecting Iran's nuclear program.

The White House's planted WSJ story told us they were spying on Israel out of worries that Israel would strike at Iran. And it's only escalating. (via Tom Gross)

Since 2012, hundreds of employees of the Israeli defense establishment encountered a strange phenomenon: the staff of the US embassy in Israel refused to grant them visas to enter the USA.
The applicants included IDF servicemen and employees of IMOD, Israeli defense industries and such intelligence agencies as ISA and Mossad. Numerous testimonies indicated that the US embassy had a list of Israeli defense operatives, and entrance was denied to many of them despite the fact that they never encountered problems obtaining a visa in the past.
According to those testimonies, since 2012, some of the applicants received visas for just a few weeks after they had been 'given the runaround', while others were questioned upon their arrival in the USA. Some absurd situations arose. For example, members of the Israeli delegation to the USA were forced to leave the USA for Canada and have their visas renewed in that country, since their visas for staying on US soil had been renewed only for very short periods of time, again and again (or refused).
At the time, the US embassy in Israel refused to provide any explanations regarding this "Visa Refusal Policy", not even in response to a question submitted to the embassy by this writer, but the reason is being clarified in the last few days: a revelation by the Wall Street Journal last weekend maintains that the USA initiated a massive effort to obtain information from employees of the Israeli defense establishment in an attempt to find out whether Israel intended to attack the nuclear facilities in Iran. One of the methods being mentioned was an attempt to extract the information from Israelis seeking visas to enter the USA, and the questioning officials were not employees of USCIS (US Citizenship and Immigration Services) but investigators of the CIA (US Central Intelligence Agency) working undercover.

This type of behavior is as much harassment as espionage. It's not a very effective recruitment or information gathering tool. It's the equivalent of the waiter spitting in your plate at your table instead of doing it in the kitchen. It's a statement of hostility aimed in a very specific direction.

Israel's response is also slightly more public than it usually gets. There have been Israelis arrested for spying for the CIA before. But it's never been discussed openly to avoid harming relations with the US.

Israel Military Intelligence issued a warning to Israeli soldiers to beware of recruitment attempts by the CIA, Israel’s Channel 2 reported on Sunday.
According to the report, the Information Security Department of IDF Intelligence sent a memo to all soldiers and officers to be on their guard and “report any unusual incidents.”

While on the surface, Obama is trying to put a good face on the relationship to fool Jewish voters, there's a good deal of ugliness happening under the surface. Obama is still worried that Israel will ruin his Iran "achievement" with an air strike on its nuclear program.

And besides, Obama has to worry about Israel passing classified information on... to Congress.

Soon after the U.S. and other major powers entered negotiations last year to curtail Iran’s nuclear program, senior White House officials learned Israel was spying on the closed-door talks...
The espionage didn’t upset the White House as much as Israel’s sharing of inside information with U.S. lawmakers and others to drain support from a high-stakes deal intended to limit Iran’s nuclear program, current and former officials said.
“It is one thing for the U.S. and Israel to spy on each other. It is another thing for Israel to steal U.S. secrets and play them back to U.S. legislators to undermine U.S. diplomacy,” said a senior U.S. official briefed on the matter.

How dare Israel pass U.S. secrets... to the U.S.

As much as Obama views Israel as an enemy... he views Congress as an even bigger enemy.