Pentagon raises Israel espionage threat to highest level

The Defense Intelligence Agency raised its counterintelligence threat level for Israel to “critical,” the top of the scale, in an assessment circulated within the Pentagon in recent weeks. Two U.S. officials and one former official described it to NBC News, and one of them saw an internal DIA message posting the new level. The underlying document runs seven pages, includes a chart, and concludes that Israel’s capacity for both human espionage and technical collection against the U.S. sits at a critical level. It lists specific incidents that drove the change, though the officials who described it did not know whether any single event triggered the reassessment.

Israel denies it. A spokesperson for the Israeli Embassy in Washington called the claim “completely false,” saying Israel collects against its enemies, not its allies. A White House official said the entire story is false and came from someone without knowledge of the situation. The Pentagon declined to comment, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not respond.

Set the denials aside and look at what the assessment claims, because the two halves of it map onto two different defensive problems. Human espionage means recruitment and coercion of people with access, the slow work of cultivating a source or exploiting one who volunteers. Technical collection means the hardware and signals side: intercepting phones, planting implants, pulling data off devices that cross a border or sit in a hotel room. Rating both at critical is a statement that the adversary is competent across the full stack, not strong in just one lane.

The practical response the officials described is unglamorous and already standard practice. Senior U.S. officials travelling to Israel carry burner phones and laptops, and they treat hotel rooms as hostile listening environments. “The U.S. already takes extra precautions when visiting Israel,” one official said. “They’re well-known to aggressively collect.” Emily Harding of CSIS described the Israeli service as “hyper-aggressive” and “exceedingly interested in what we are up to.” The new threat level formalises caution that counterintelligence officers have carried for years rather than introducing a new control.

What matters for anyone who runs the systems behind this is the device discipline, and it generalises well beyond diplomats. A burner and a guarded conversation in a hotel room come from the same assumption: treat the device and the room as hostile, and keep nothing on either you would mind losing. Engineers who travel to places that collect aggressively already work this way, and it is the practical shape of what the officials described.

The part the officials were careful to note is that none of this has touched the day-to-day intelligence-sharing between the two countries, which continues, particularly around the Iran war. Counterintelligence posture and the liaison relationship run on separate tracks. You can hand an ally finished intelligence every morning and still assume that ally is working to read your internal deliberations, and the sources say that is roughly the state of things now. The concern driving the reassessment, per the officials, is that Israel is trying to surveil senior U.S. officials to learn how the Trump administration is deliberating on the Middle East, at a moment when the two governments disagree on the war with Iran.

That timing is the context the officials put around it. Trump and Netanyahu have clashed over Iran and over Israeli operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon, including a phone call this past week after which Trump told reporters he had called Netanyahu “crazy.” Since a ceasefire in early April, Trump has pursued a diplomatic deal to end the war the U.S. and Israel launched on Feb. 28, while Israel has been publicly skeptical that Iran would honour one. Israel has an obvious interest in knowing whether Washington resumes major operations or winds the conflict down, and in knowing it early.

Allies spying on allies is old news, and the sources supply the reference points. Jonathan Pollard, a Navy intelligence analyst, drew 30 years for selling top-secret documents to Israel in the 1980s. The 2013 Snowden leaks showed the U.S. tapping the phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The two former officials who spoke about trust put the risk plainly: collection against a partner during a real policy disagreement is the kind of thing that erodes a working relationship, even one as close and as busy as this one.