NSA Threat Assessments on Israel

“One of NSA’s biggest threats is actually from friendly intelligence services, like Israel.”

That is a senior National Security Agency official, speaking in an internal top secret document from 2008 titled “Which Foreign Intelligence Service Is the Biggest Threat to the US?” He was the agency’s Global Capabilities Manager for Countering Foreign Intelligence, and he named Israel repeatedly.

He also described the tension in a single sentence: “On the one hand, the Israelis are extraordinarily good Sigint partners for us, but on the other, they target us to learn our positions on Middle East problems.” A National Intelligence Estimate, he said, had ranked Israel as “the third most aggressive intelligence service against the US.”

Not one document, a category

What makes this material significant is that it is not a single leaked assessment or one analyst’s view. Israel appears in this role across the planning documents by which American intelligence allocates its own resources.

The 2007 Strategic Mission List named Israel as a top espionage threat against the United States government, including against its intelligence services. Under the heading covering foreign intelligence, counterintelligence, and denial and deception activities, Israel was listed as a leading perpetrator of “espionage/intelligence collection operations and manipulation/influence operations against U.S. government, military, science and technology and Intelligence Community” organs. The same document identified Israel, alongside North Korea, Cuba and India, as a leading threat to the infrastructure of American financial and banking institutions.

The 2013 intelligence budget, the classified document usually called the black budget, listed Israel in several places as a target and among the hostile foreign intelligence services. It recorded that American counterintelligence operations were “strategically focused against priority targets of China, Russia, Iran, Cuba, and Israel.”

A 2007 internal history of the signals intelligence relationship since 1992 described the cooperation as productive and valuable, and complained that even after September 11 the relationship remained almost entirely one-sided in Israel’s favor.

These are budget and planning files. They do not record opinions. They record where American counterintelligence money and effort were actually being spent.

The denial

In March 2015, after the Wall Street Journal reported that Israel had spied on the American negotiations with Iran and passed intelligence to members of Congress, the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a statement that reached well past the story it was answering:

“The state of Israel does not conduct espionage against the United States or Israel’s other allies.”

That is a categorical claim, and the documents above contradict it directly. They say Israel targets the United States government for electronic surveillance, and that it does so more aggressively than nearly any other country in the world.

Asked about the raw intelligence arrangement, the NSA declined to discuss specific sharing agreements but confirmed that intelligence services work together “under specific and regulated conditions.”

What followed

Nothing followed.

No policy changed. Military aid continued at the same level. No American administration has ever publicly addressed the gap between what these documents say and what officials say out loud, and no official statement has ever reconciled the two.

Why it matters

Every other case in this archive is an episode with a beginning and an end. This one is the baseline underneath them.

The language is what carries it. Hostile foreign intelligence service. Priority counterintelligence target. Third most aggressive intelligence service against the United States. Those phrases appear in the documents by which the American government decides where to point its own defensive operations, and they place Israel in the same category as Russia, China, Iran and Cuba.

The country described that way in the internal files is the same country that has received more American aid than any other nation in history. Both of those things are true simultaneously, they have been true for decades, and no American government has ever been willing to say the first one in public.

Sources

NSA, “Which Foreign Intelligence Service Is the Biggest Threat to the US?” (internal document, 2008, top secret) — published by The Guardian and The Intercept, 2013–2015
NSA Strategic Mission List, 2007 (top secret) — published by The Intercept via Glenn Greenwald, August 2014
Director of National Intelligence, FY2013 congressional budget justification, the “black budget” (top secret) — published by the Washington Post, August 2013; Israel sections reported by The Intercept, March 2015
NSA-ISNU Raw Intelligence Sharing Memorandum (top secret) — published by The Guardian, September 2013
NSA, “History of the US-Israel SIGINT Relationship, post 1992” (top secret, 2007) — published by The Intercept, March 2015
The Intercept, “Netanyahu’s Spying Denials Contradicted by Secret NSA Documents,” Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Fishman, March 25, 2015
Newsweek, “Israel Flagged as Top Spy Threat to U.S. in New Snowden/NSA Document,” February 23, 2015

Note on source tier: Every document here is an American government intelligence product, disclosed by Edward Snowden and published by established outlets. None has been officially declassified or authenticated: the United States government has neither confirmed nor denied their contents. No outlet that published them has retracted or corrected them, and the government has never challenged their accuracy, only their publication. The Intercept, which published several of them, has a declared editorial position; the documents themselves are quoted here directly rather than through anyone’s characterization of them. Note also that these files predate the 2015 Iran negotiations story that prompted Netanyahu’s denial, and they establish a general pattern rather than documenting collection against those particular talks.