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Israeli Responses to the FBI's Espionage Investigation Leak - A Compendium

(Institute for Contemporary Affairs/Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs) Israel's security establishment insists there is no Israeli involvement in allegations that a Pentagon analyst provided Israel with secret documents relating to White House deliberations over Iran - as reported by CBS News. MK Danny Yatom (Labor), who served as head of the Mossad in the 1990s, disclosed on Israel Radio that there are rigid rules against any Israeli espionage activity on U.S. soil, particularly since the 1985 Pollard affair. Yuval Steinitz, chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee which oversees the Israeli intelligence services, said he was confident that Israel had not abandoned this more than twenty-year-old decision not to spy on the U.S. Following a similar accusation in the late 1990s, CIA Director George Tenet found the charges baseless and wrote Israel a letter of apology. The CIA, unlike other U.S. intelligence agencies, has political differences with Israel over the Arab-Israeli conflict. CIA relations with Israel have cooled lately over al-Qaeda operations in Africa and Israeli information about the hiding of Saddam Hussein's non-conventional weapons outside Iraq. The background to these allegations is the domestic American debate over foreign policy, with the leak timed to embarrass President Bush on the eve of the Republican convention.
2004-08-30 00:00:00
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