Christopher Greene



Documents leaked in December by former NSA contractor, Edward Snowden, revealed that the US National Security Agency worked hand in hand with the UK’s GCHQ to target email addresses belonging to the then-serving Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, among others. According to an exclusive report by the Israeli news agency, Debka, specializing in intelligence and security news, after 2009 Washington introduced “a high-powered, multilayered system of intelligence-gathering” — especially against Israel, about which neither Snowden nor the Israelis have been forthcoming. This system, the agency claimed, had a “single narrow focus: to pick up the slightest murmur or clue suggesting that Israel was about to launch an attack on Iran’s nuclear sites, which it had threatened to do without prior notice to Washington.”

“Listening in on the laconic conversations Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu held with Ehud Barak was not enough. What the spies were told to look for was out-of-the-way conduct, such as an order placed suddenly for a large quantity of aircraft fuel, or the import of an unusual amount of emergency medical equipment,” Debka’s report concluded.

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