DEBKAfile Special Report March 24, 2015,
Yet another Obama administration thrust in its campaign to stigmatize Binyamin Netanyahu and the newly elected Israeli government came Tuesday, March 24, in the form of a pejorative leak to The Wall Street Journal.
“Israeli intelligence was eavesdropping on closed-door nuclear negotiations between Iran and the US and other world powers, then passing the classified information along to the US Congress to try and preemptively scuttle the deal, The WSJ reported, adding from its unnamed sources: “It’s one thing for the US and Israel to spy on each other. It is another thing for Israel to steal US secrets and play them back to US legislators to undermine US diplomacy.”
Citing the spy-versus-spy rivalry often operating behind the scenes of US-Israel relations, the paper reports that, in fact, the White House discovered Israel had an inside track on the talks by snooping on communications among Israeli officials.
“They carried details the US believed could have come only from access to the confidential talks.”
“These allegations are utterly false,” a senior official in the Israeli Prime Minister’s office said. “The state of Israel does not directly conduct espionage against the United States or its other allies.”
debkafile’s sources say that the WSJ “allegation” was timed for the trip to Paris by Israel’s Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz’s and national security adviser Yossie Cohen with a warning to France and later other European leaders that the nuclear deal shaping up between the US and Iran enables Iran to preserve its capabilities and remain a threshold nuclear state.
Monday, they met the senior French negotiator, National Security Adviser Jacques Audibert. They were able to hand him information at variance with the data the US had given out including how far the bilateral talks with Iran had progressed.
The Israeli delegation is due in London on the same mission Tuesday.
The WSJ story raises three points.
1. The Obama administration repeatedly promised to keep Israel informed on the content of the Six Power negotiations with Iran led by the United States and make them “transparent.” The WSJ story demonstrates that Washington violated this commitment, by revealing that Israel needed to activate its spies to get at the facts. It is also possible alternatively that the data from the closed door sessions was leaked to Israel by other participants such as Russia, France, Germany or the UK, who too were aghast at the extent of American concessions to Iran for a deal.
2. Did the Obama administration seriously expect Israel to sit back and wait calmly for its diplomats to make concession after concession to the Iranians, knowing that Iran was being allowed to come closer step by step to a nuclear threshold state to the peril of Israel, its Gulf neighbors and Middle East security at large?
3. Why did Israel need to snoop on the talks when Israel, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, all of which strongly oppose the deal taking shape, believed they should have been partners to talks that determined their fate, alongside the six external world powers? If Iran objected, the Middle East nations most concerned might have been given a role on the sidelines, instead of being left out of decision-making in the way that the old Colonial powers determined the boundaries of the region among themselves.
In this regard, debkafile notes that the Obama administration continues its vendetta against Binyamin Netanyahu day be day, as though he was not elected in far and honest elections which permitted every Israeli citizen to make his or her will known through the ballot box. This campaign is strongly echoed by the left-wing camp which lost the election and refuses to accept its outcome, as though nothing has changed.
Such Orwellian inversion of reality. (1)The back social organizer is deciding the fate of ME and those parties directly affected are side-lined; (2)He promises to be transparent and then balks at Congress finding out his dirty secrets; (3)Instead of involving Congress as he is constitutionally bound and has promised, it is a third party country that informs Congress (allegedly that is) and is castigated for it; (4) Just like Pollard has been rotting away in a US pen for over 30 years for giving Israel what the US was bound to give by treaty but reneged on, so to not only is the US promise to keep Israel informed reneged upon but Israel is castigated for allegedly helping itself to the information that was wrongfully withheld; (5) and as Mr. Harris astutely points out, even if even under such circumstances it is by some stretch of the imagination somehow not nice for Israel to spy on its once and future alley (after this POTUS crawls back under his slimy rock), how is Israel spying on the Iranian side of the equation to be found fault with? Fasten your belts kiddies, its going to be rough, very rough 22 months ahead!
@ mar55:
In Arabic there is a say… “To every dog there is its time”. I have nothing but love for dogs, but Arabs consider them dark creatures. Ergo the say.
@ mar55:
From your keyboard to G-d’s ears.
@ SHmuel HaLevi 2:
@ Avigail:
http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/2015/03/24/israeli-spying-may-save-the-world-from-obamas-reckless-nuclear-diplomacy-with-iran/
It is obvious that Obirat was caught with his hands in the cookie jar. He has not anything to complain about after
he was being deceitful endangering the entire ME in order to pass his agenda. Who cares if the entire world catches fire due to his stupidity. The show must go on. His ego is more important than peaceful coexistence in the ME or any part of the world. Talking about peace and creating war is a communist specialty.
He can’t stand the fact that BB outsmarted him.
There is a special place in HELL for people like him.
With so much intrigue in the ME I don’t not understand how
the Saudis who financed his miss-education have not done
anything to eliminate the backstabber, treasonous rat.
Now I read further that Israel officially has denyed spying on the US.
Okay. But there is every possible reason they should be spying on ayatollist Iran. If someone announces he is your intended killer, prudence dictates that you take steps to know everything about him, and when and how he intends to come at you. If that involves his discussions with your purported friend, that is less important than knowing what you need to know in order to survive.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
My wife Stefi (Stefanija Prasnjak Harris) has a good sense of South Slavic humor. While sitting here over coffee this morning at a Madison WI Starbucks, she told me that Mr Obama, now down to the last 22 months of his lame duck petulant, feckless and fading imperium, is acting like a thief who got his fingers on someone else’s credit card; with only a short time before the card number is cancelled by the issuing bank, he seeks to cash in wherever and however before his 22 months run out.
Politeness dictates the widespread but false assumption that friends do not spy on friends. But when the demeanor and trustworthiness of one’s “friend” merits double apostrophes, then you have no option but to trust and verify, exactly as President Ronald Reagan with the then-decaying Soviet Union 30 years ago. Presently, the USA is decaying as rapidly as was the USSR in that era.
In any case, the Congress of the United States, the State of Israel, Saudi Arabia, Trans-Jordan, Egypt, France, Russia, China, India, Japan, and any other country with an interest in the Middle East now knows for certain that Obama and Kerry are acting in 2015 exactly as did Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax in 1938, with Israel being treated like Czechoslovakia and the entire Middle East like the Europe that was awaiting Hitler’s conquest.
Nobody should be surprised if Egypt, Saudi-Arabia, Trans-Jordan work up a mutual defense arrangement with Israel against ayatollist Iran. And I also am certain V V Putin despises Obama even more intensely now than he ever has before. And with reasons that most of would be compelled to accept as valid.
As for the Congress of the United States, they now fully understand that Netanyahu knew exactly what he was talking about when he appeared before that august bicameral body, and that their president and secretary of state were both lying to their own legislature.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
The man-child is unhinged.
The only thing that is… transparent… is that Mr. Hussein Obama’s operatives spy on Israel. They themselves said so… Idiots.