On Wednesday, Fox News and The Jerusalem Post ran stories based on a report from Kuwait’s Al-Jarida newspaper claiming that the U.S. had revealed to Iranian authorities the identities of 10 Mossad agents in Iran who allegedly were involved in the July 31 assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.
Al-Jarida claimed its report was based on information provided by a member of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. The alleged source told the Kuwaiti paper that U.S. officials had visited Iran secretly after the assassination with the goal of appeasing the regime. They told their Iranian counterparts that Israel had not informed them of its plans to kill Haniyeh and proceeded to provide them with the Mossad agents’ identities.
On Thursday, Fox News deleted the story and the Post updated its report. The updated article led with the news that the U.S. National Security Council denied the Kuwaiti story.
On Wednesday night, I shared the Post report on my X account. My post received well over one million views. Following the Post’s publication of its revision and Fox’s deletion of its initial report, I deleted my post and shared the Post’s revised story.
Given the severity of the charge, why were Fox News and the Post so quick to report the Al-Jarida story? Why was my initial inclination to lend credence the report? The answer, in short, is that the Biden-Harris administration, like the Obama-Biden administration before it, has a track record of leaking Israeli operations in Iran.
Consider just a few well-known and widely reported examples.
In May 2022, senior IRGC commander Sayyed Khodei was killed by gunmen outside his home. The gunmen escaped the scene on a motorcycle. According to Israeli officials, Khodei served as deputy commander of IRGC Unit 840 and was involved in planning cross-border plots against foreigners, including Israelis. At the time he was killed, Khodei was reportedly planning the assassination of French Jewish philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy.
To avoid the prospect of retaliation and escalation, Israel did not claim responsibility for the strike. But Biden officials told The New York Times that Israel had killed him. The operation was carried out during Naftali Bennett’s premiership and Bennett and his associates were reportedly angered by the administration’s move, which raised the prospect of increased Iranian violence against the Jewish state.
On April 12, 2021, Israel bombed the electricity line serving the uranium enrichment facility at Natanz and so rendered the entire installation nonfunctional. The operation was considered the most substantial act of sabotage Israel had yet carried out against Iran’s nuclear sites. It took place a week and a half after the Biden administration had inaugurated its negotiations with the Iranians towards reinstating the 2015 nuclear deal.
Still led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the time, Israel opted to wait until two hours before the operation to inform the administration of its plans. Netanyahu’s decision reportedly owed to his fear that President Joe Biden or his advisers would leak the planned mission to the media to prevent it from taking place.
Netanyahu’s fears of U.S. leaks were based on his experience with the Obama administration.
Throughout Barack Obama’s two terms in office, his administration routinely leaked information about Israel’s operations and planned operations in Iran and Syria. The administration’s leaks undermined Israel’s efforts to block Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and endangered its bid to block Iran from transferring advanced weapons to Hezbollah terror forces in Lebanon.
Highlights (or lowlights, as the case may be) of the leaks by the Obama administration revolve around its successful effort to block Israel from attacking Iran’s nuclear installation at Fordow in 2012.
On March 29, 2012, Foreign Policy magazine reported that Azerbaijan had agreed to permit Israel to launch a strike against Iran’s nuclear installations from its air bases. The same day, Bloomberg reported on a congressional report that claimed it was futile to attack Iran’s nuclear installations because “Iran’s nuclear installations were so dispersed that it is unclear what the ultimate effect of a strike would be.”
The Foreign Policy report quoted a U.S. intelligence officer saying, “We’re watching what Iran does closely … But we’re now watching what Israel is doing in Azerbaijan. And we’re not happy with it.”
Israel’s veteran military affairs commentator Ron Ben-Yishai, in a column in Ynet, expressed outrage at the U.S. leaks. Accusing Obama of “betraying Israel,” Ben-Yishai fumed, “This ‘surgical strike’” of leaks is undertaken via reports in the American and British media, but the campaign’s aims are fully operational: To make it more difficult for Israeli decision-makers to order the IDF to carry out a strike, and what’s even graver, to erode the IDF’s capacity to launch such strike with minimal casualties.”
The leaks weren’t only geared towards preventing an airstrike or commando raid on Iran’s installations. They were directed as well against Israel’s efforts to undermine the Iranian nuclear program through cyberwarfare and other forms of sabotage.
On June 1, 2012, the administration leaked the Stuxnet cyberwarfare program to the New York Times. Stuxnet was a top-secret cyber worm developed jointly by the United States and Israel. Beginning in 2010, it was used to sabotage Iran’s main centrifuge production site at Natanz. The Times reported that in 2012, Obama was outraged because Israel had modified the cyber worm and allegedly sought to expand the use of the cyberweapon to other Iranian installations including economic infrastructure.
The Times’s story quoted one of Obama’s briefers telling the then president, “We think there was a modification done by the Israelis.” After Obama questioned the officials, then-Vice President Joe Biden expressed outrage. Biden “fumed, ‘It’s got to be the Israelis. They went too far.’”
The Stuxnet leak wasn’t a one-off. Two weeks later, the administration leaked details of another joint U.S.-Israel cyber tool called “Flame,” to The Washington Post. Flame was reportedly developed for spying on Iran’s nuclear program.
The Post reported that “the United States and Israel jointly developed a sophisticated computer virus nicknamed Flame that collected intelligence in preparation for cyber-sabotage aimed at slowing Iran’s ability to develop a nuclear weapon.”
Then there was Syria. More or less at the outset of the civil war in 2011, Israel began carrying out operations in Syria to block Iran’s efforts to transfer advanced weapons, including guided missiles to Hezbollah terror forces in Lebanon. Israel made it a point never to acknowledge its operations so as to minimize pressure on Syrian President Bashar Assad to retaliate.
Beginning in 2012, as the Obama administration opened covert nuclear talks with Iran, Washington began leaking information about the Israeli strikes to the media to undermine them and deter Israel from intensifying its operation. For instance, on July 5, 2013, the administration told The New York Times that Israel was behind a strike on a shipment of a P-800 Yakhont surface-to-sea missile system at Latakia.
In a long analysis of Obama’s Iran strategy published in 2015, former Bush National Security Council director Michael Doran argued that Obama chose to shield Assad from efforts to overthrow him to ingratiate himself with the Iranian regime, which, he claimed, rightly viewed the Assad regime as an “Iranian equity.”
Israel’s relations with the U.S. reached new lows in 2013-2015 as U.S. nuclear talks with Iran went into high gear. The talks and the agreements they produced served to legitimize Iran’s nuclear weapons program and ultimately provided Iran with a windfall of cash and a glide path to a nuclear arsenal by 2025. In other words, the nuclear talks, and the deals they produced, constituted a strategic betrayal of Israel by the Obama administration.
In October 2022, The Wall Street Journal reported that in 2012, while keeping Israel in the dark about his nuclear talks with Tehran, Obama had U.S. spy agencies conduct aggressive espionage against Israel’s military bases and eavesdropped on secret communications by Israeli leaders to prevent Netanyahu from ordering a military assault on the Fordo installation in Iran.
Currently, the Biden administration is deploying a second naval carrier group to the region amid growing fears in Washington that Israel may strike Iran’s nuclear installations ahead of or in the aftermath of an Iranian strike on Israel. In a similar fashion, Obama ordered a second U.S. aircraft carrier to the region in 2012, amid fears of an impending Israeli strike on Fordo.
In 2013, National Security Agency defector Edward Snowden revealed that the U.S. was eavesdropping on foreign allied leaders including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President François Hollande and Netanyahu.
Chastened, Obama pledged to end the practice. But insofar as Israel was concerned, far from ending the espionage, he stepped it up. In a stunning exposé in December 2015, months after the nuclear deal was approved in Congress, The Wall Street Journal revealed the extent of NSA spying on Israel.
In its zeal to uncover Israel’s moves to undermine the nuclear deal Obama had negotiated with Iran, Obama’s National Security Agency intercepted communications between Israeli officials and American Jewish leaders as well as members of Congress and transferred the information to the White House.
The aggressive spying was illegal because it effectively involved spying on American citizens and lawmakers. The unprecedented move showed that the Obama administration viewed Israel’s determination to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons as the major threat to its primary foreign policy goal—realigning the U.S. towards Iran and away from Israel and the Sunni Arab states by engaging in nuclear appeasement of Tehran.
During the Trump presidency, intelligence cooperation between Israel and the U.S. reached unprecedented levels of openness and intimacy. But due to his experience with the Obama-Biden administration, when Biden entered office, Netanyahu reportedly ordered Israel’s spy agencies to curtail intelligence sharing with their U.S. counterparts.
This policy was abrogated during the Bennett-Lapid government’s 17-month tenure. Acting at the urging of the Biden administration, upon entering office in May 2021, Bennett reinstated the intelligence sharing. And as the U.S.’s leak of Israel’s role in Khodei’s assassination in May 2022 made clear, the Biden administration returned the favor by reinstating Obama’s practice of leaking Israeli operations that were believed to endanger its efforts to appease Iran.
In all likelihood, the Al-Jarida report was indeed false. The implications of the report—that the U.S. would facilitate the roundup and all but certain torture and murder of Mossad agents by the regime in Iran in the middle of a major war—are simply too extreme to countenance. The rupture such a hostile move would cause to U.S.-Israel intelligence ties would be too severe for even a hostile administration to accept. Even worse from a U.S. perspective, such a step would undermine the credibility and trustworthiness of U.S. intelligence agencies in the eyes of partners and agents worldwide.
All the same, both the Obama-Biden and the Biden-Harris administrations’ records of bad faith towards Israel on issues related to Jerusalem’s efforts to block Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons make it difficult at first blush to dismiss reports like Al-Jarida’s as disinformation.