179. Did Israel Spy on Trump’s Iran Negotiations? (Ep 1)

Do Israel and America spy on each other? And how do close allies navigate stealing each other’s secrets? Listen as David and Gordon step inside the tricky intelligence sharing relationship between the US and Israel. ------------------- THE REST IS CLASSIFIED LIVE 2026 at The Rest Is Fest: Buy your tickets ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to see David and Gordon live on stage at London’s Southbank Centre on 4 September: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/the-rest-is-classified-live/⁠⁠⁠⁠ ------------------- Sign-up for our free newsletter where producer Becki takes you behind the scenes of the show: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://mailchi.mp/goalhanger.com/tric-free-newsletter-sign⁠-up⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ------------------- Join the Declassified Club to go deeper into the world of espionage with exclusive Q&As, interviews with top intelligence insiders, regular livestreams, ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, and weekly deep dives into original spy stories. Members also get curated reading lists, special book discounts, prize draws, and access to our private chat community. Just go to ⁠⁠therestisclassified.com⁠ or join on Apple Podcasts. ------------------- Get a 10% discount on business PCs, printers and accessories using the code TRIC10. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://HP.com/CLASSIFIED⁠⁠⁠⁠ for more information. T&C's apply. ------------------- EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal ➼ https://nordvpn.com/restisclassified Upgrade your online protection with an all-in-one security app! It’s risk free with NordVPN’s 30-day money-back guarantee 🌍 ------------------- Email: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@restisclassified⁠ Video Editor: Joe Pettit Social Producer: Emma Jackson Assistant Producer: Alfie Rowe Producer: Becki Hills Head of History: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 0:24Speaker 01

  Do Israel and America spy on each other?

• 0:28Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Thank you, David. Spoiler alert. And how do close allies navigate stealing each other's secrets? I've been completely thrown off by David's spoiling the whole premise of these two episodes.

• 0:39Speaker 00

  We usually, we pose these questions at the beginning and then it can take us, it can take us 45 minutes to an hour to answer them. And I thought, why not just do it right away? Right away? Just give them the Cliff Notes.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  And today we're beginning a two-part series on this question. I mean, is it possible that allies could spy on each other, David? I'm shocked.

• 0:58Speaker 00

  Shocked.

• 0:59Speaker 01

  To think, I'm shocked to think that might happen. But it's particularly interesting, isn't it? Especially at the moment, I'd say, this issue about whether America and Israel spy on each other and what that really means for their very complicated, but increasingly close relationship.

• 1:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, we are recording this coming on the heels of some very interesting revelations about how, how close the Israeli-US military partnership has become during Operation Epic Fury, of course. We had the remarkable revelation that Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sat in the White House Situation Room in February, looking President Trump in the eye. He'd brought along the head of the Mossad, Israel's foreign intelligence agency, and they briefed the president on plans to attack around it. And then, of course, during the war, the level of military integration between the two countries. Maybe this is too superlative, but it felt unprecedented to me, how close the coordination

• 2:02Speaker 00

  had become between the two over the war in Iran.

• 2:05Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And I think it's interesting watching that from the UK, which in the past, in previous military operations, you think of the Iraq War, had been the ally which would have been working most closely in military and sometimes intelligence partnership with US. And I know Britain's ambassador to Washington was quoted, and he hadn't said this publicly. He said it, I think, to a group of students at the embassy.

• 2:27Speaker 00

  Was this Peter Mandelson?

• 2:28Speaker 01

  No, this was after Peter Mandelson. This is the current ambassador. But he actually said, if America has a special relationship these days, it's with Israel, not the UK. And I thought it's a really interesting insight into just how close that is, which also makes the issue of intelligence gathering even more complex, doesn't it? And it's not been without controversy in the US because the closeness of that relationship over the Iran War and the fact the Iran War, it's fair to say, did not go to plan. And so, you know, that's clearly raised questions, actually, about the closeness of the relationship and influence and control and therefore intelligence.

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• 6:12Speaker 00

  Well, we've also had this other story, which The New York Times broke in June, where it was reported that US intelligence agencies have raised concern about Israel eavesdropping on American negotiators who were trying to figure out what a longer-term, more durable, if such a thing were possible, peace arrangement would be with Iran. And of course, that actually is, is the spark for us doing these episodes because I think this mental model that somehow because the two countries are so close, it's, it's wild and unprecedented that they would spy on each other and somehow against the rules. And yet,

• 6:55Speaker 00

  as The Times reported, the Israelis apparently have been spying on Steve Whitkoff, Jared Kushner, others involved in the negotiations to figure out what kind of deal the US might be trying to secure with the Iranians. We are going to look at this question of how do and under what circumstances do Israel and the US spy on each other? We're going to look at this through the dynamics of what's happening today and some of the kind of more recent press reporting that's come out on this. We're also going to look at this through the lens of history in what I think is one of the most interesting and well-known kind of friendly fire espionage cases ever. And that is the case of Jonathan J. Pollard,

• 7:39Speaker 00

  who was a US Navy intelligence analyst who, over 17 months in the 1980s, spied for the Israelis and wound up handing them a stack of very useful classified information that Pollard himself estimated would stand about, you stacked up all the documents, it would stand about six feet wide, six feet long and 10 feet high. And through that historical lens, I think we'll look at some big questions that get raised about the way that the US and the Israelis spy on each other. And maybe even more broadly, how does espionage between allies actually work? What is the, what is the kind of risk reward calculation when

• 8:22Speaker 00

  what your friend is doing matters a lot to you and your friend might not be telling you the whole story? And so you have a kind of an inclination to steal secrets from your friend to understand what they might be doing.

• 8:34Speaker 01

  Again, I'm shocked, shocked at the idea this would happen. Obviously, just to say, would never happen between the US and UK. I mean, two friendly countries like ours are at very different agreements. Or between two people like us, we'd never spy on each other, would we, David? You'd never use your spy skills to work out what I'm up to. So, so, you know.

• 8:51Speaker 00

  I would never put a key, I would never put a keystroke logger on your phone, Gordon. This would never, such, such things would never happen. Never.

• 8:58Speaker 01

  Has he started work on that script yet? No. I'm going to chase him up. But it does raise some really interesting questions, doesn't it? About, yeah, about what lies behind the decisions to spy, but also what the consequences are of getting caught. Because I think that the, the politics and the result of getting caught spying on your friends can be very different from getting caught spying on your adversaries or on other countries, where frankly, it's, it's usual business. And I think the Pollard case is really interesting in terms of the fallout. Let's set up a little bit, David, the history of the US-Israel relationship, particularly when it comes to intelligence and spying.

• 9:34Speaker 00

  Well, the relationship has been built slowly over time. And I think in particular, in the early days of the relationship, was very heavily reliant on personal connections between the Israeli state and the US intelligence apparatus. So Israel, of course, founded in 1948. US intelligence at that time, the agency, the broader intelligence community, initially worried that the Russians, the Soviets, might use the Israeli state as a new platform for influence in the Middle East. And by 1951, the CIA has set up a formal liaison channel with the newly created Mossad, Israel's foreign intelligence agency.

• 10:14Speaker 00

  And that relationship for many years between the CIA and Mossad is the personal fiefdom of James Jesus Angleton, longtime counterintelligence chief, all around sort of nefarious character, friend of Kim Philby, friend of the show. Dear personal friend of of Kium Filby and we, I mean, Angleton's his own, his own series. We've talked about about doing that for for some time and we will. But Angleton works out an arrangement with with the Israelis. And again, when we talk about spy arrangements, we're not talking about ratified treaties that are written blood in most cases. We're talking about mutual understandings that could, in certain cases, be violated.

• 10:59Speaker 00

  But the understanding in kind of the 50s and 60s is, if you think about it as friends don't spy on friends, and there's a commitment between the two services not to target each other, which, again, I'd put a bit of a, an asterisk around that. Also, this is important, the two services begin to share product of mutual interest, which makes sense. Angleton runs the, runs the relationship for several decades. And I should say, there is a very early payoff, in particular for the agency, because the Israelis are running networks of assets among kind of Soviet bloc emigres. They produce thousands of reports for the agency on the Soviet Union.

• 11:35Speaker 00

  The most well-known is actually that the Mossad collected, stole, the text of then-Soviet Premier Khrushchev's 1956 secret speech in which he denounces Stalin. That's an Israeli product that ends up in Angleton's hands and thus in the CIA's hands. So some very valuable intelligence that the Israelis are able to gather and pass along to the Americans.

• 12:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, because I guess Israel's going to have access to places that it's harder for the Americans to get access to in the Middle East, but also through its network of contacts around the world. There's going to be things like, I think after some of the wars they have with the Arab states, 67 and 73, they capture Soviet weaponry, which has been given to the Arab states and therefore can then pass it to the Americans, who can then analyze it, which is obviously pretty useful. You could get elements of friction, because this is really interesting incident, which, again, maybe we should do separately at some point, in 1967, when a US spy ship, a signals intelligence gathering ship, the USS Liberty, is hit and hit by the Israelis

• 12:45Speaker 01

  during the Six Day War, killing 34 American sailors. I know there is a, a view in some quarters that this was a mistake, but there's also, I mean, I wouldn't call it a conspiracy theory, a bit of a theory from others, that the Israelis didn't want the Americans to listen in to what they were doing and blew up one of their ships. But it's an example of some of the tensions and frictions, I agree.

• 13:05Speaker 00

  Well, so the NSA's own declassified cryptologic history attributes it to a combination of Israeli mistake and faulty US communications. So we should, I think, just on the record, the official kind of US government.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  That's the official view.

• 13:23Speaker 00

  View is that it was, it was an accident.

• 13:25Speaker 01

  I prefer the journalist account, but anyway.

• 13:28Speaker 00

  You prefer the conspiracy theory. But obviously, blowing up a spy boat and killing 34 sailors will add some friction to the relationship. There's another incident, which is the, I think, still lingering suspicion that the Israelis stole nuclear material from the US that was later used to create and fuel its own nuclear capability. And this is, this is a fascinating story in its own right again. It centers on what was called the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation, NUMEC, which is a privately-run fuel plant in Apollo, Pennsylvania. They processed highly enriched uranium on contract for the US government.

• 14:10Speaker 00

  And between 1965 and 1980, the FBI and other US intelligence agencies investigated the company's president, a guy named Zalman Shapiro, because there were enormous quantities of unaccounted-for uranium. And the Department of Energy records show that there were nearly 300 kilograms of unaccounted-for uranium that went missing before 1968. It's the largest, it's, it's the largest loss at any US commercial site. And when you, when you dig into it, Zalman Shapiro has, you know, he has Israeli ties. He frequently traveled to Israel. NUMEC had actually acted officially as a procurement agent for the Israeli Ministry of Defense.

• 14:55Speaker 00

  They had, you know, shipping partnerships with Israeli companies. And in 1968, the plant was visited by four Israeli intelligence officers, including the man who will eventually run Jonathan Pollard, the story will be coming to in a, in a few minutes.

• 15:09Speaker 01

  Again, another story to do in depth another time. But losing 269 kilograms of uranium strikes me as slightly careless. Also, you know, not that dissimilar to the amount currently that, you know, has started a war in Iran, and, you know, led to the Iranian side being involved. And also leaves you the question, which, again, we, maybe we can't answer, which is, how do you sneak it out if you're working at the site? I just love the idea. He's got like, kind of briefcases and underneath his papers, he just slips a load of uranium and then gets out.

• 15:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it's still a very murky situation. The, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission still says it can't rule out either hypothesis, you know, either that it was just commercial loss or some.

• 15:54Speaker 01

  Or someone in a briefcase.

• 15:56Speaker 00

  Or, or someone, someone took it out. So again, it's, it's this murky episode, but it has led, it has obviously led some to believe that the Israelis, the Israelis stole, you know, highly enriched uranium and used it to, to found their own nuclear program, which they obviously still did, I haven't. Now, despite the friction, by 1968, when Johnson is president, the US and Israel sign their first formal intelligence sharing pact. It's known as the CYR agreement. There's actually documents that have been leaked out. It doesn't show the agreement, but it shows references to this agreement. It's known as the CYR agreement. And it really was, you know, to the point you raised earlier, Gordon, I think that

• 16:39Speaker 00

  on the US side, it was driven by this desire to get access to the vast quantity of Soviet weaponry that the Israelis had, had come into possession of following the Six Day War. The US wants to be able to tap that access and exploit these different weapons platforms that are now in Israeli hands. This agreement, the CYR agreement, is broadened and reinforced several times in the ensuing decades. In 1988, it's expanded and it becomes known as Ice Castle, which is a great name.

• 17:13Speaker 01

  Good name.

• 17:14Speaker 00

  And then, post-Cold War, the Soviet threat gone, the US-Israel security relationship, the rationale really starts to shift toward, you know, terrorism, proliferation, other regional adversaries. Ice Castle is updated and it becomes known as Stone Ruby in 1996. And this brings us, I think, to a key piece of the intelligence sharing architecture between the two sides, particularly in the post-9/11 era, which is the signals intelligence. And there is a, in this 25 years after 9/11, there is a tremendous integration of the

• 17:57Speaker 00

  capabilities of the National Security Agency of the US and what is sometimes known as the Israeli Sigent National Unit, ISNU. It's also known as Unit 8200 inside the Ministry of Defense, and that is Israel's signals intelligence and sort of offensive cyber and technical collection capability, similar to, to our NSA or Britain's GCHQ.

• 18:20Speaker 01

  And which is seen, I should say, as being particularly capable and is sweeping up vast amounts of data, very good at targeted hacking, things like that. And so it makes perfect sense, doesn't it, that you start to get a large-scale sharing of that communications and intelligence data between the two sides? And that is, that is, I mean, a bit like the US and UK, actually, where actually it's the, the signals intelligence, GCHQ NSA relationship, which is really at the heart of this intelligence sharing. It's the same, I think, with the US and Israel, isn't it? It's easy to get focused on the human stuff, but it's that sharing of info, which has really been important.

• 18:57Speaker 00

  And there, there's so much raw sharing, because it's not just, it's not just finished, you know, signals intelligence. When I was in the agency and I'm reading a report from NSA, I'm not reading.

• 19:12Speaker 00

  The actual transcript of a conversation or the raw material, the NSA has analysts and linguists who process those things into reports that get disseminated. And those reports are the things that policymakers see that get cited in products like the President's Daily Brief and on and on. NSA and Unit 8200 are sharing raw information with each other. So they're kind of, it's like, I have a pipe and you have a pipe and we're sharing stuff that comes out of these pipes and then you can do with it what you will. And there was so much sharing under the provisions of that deal that the US had to work out sort of safeguards for what the Israelis would do with information if they ended up having

• 19:55Speaker 00

  a US person on one side of this phone call.

• 19:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:59Speaker 00

  And in particular, what would the Israelis do if they had a US official, a lawmaker, someone at the White House on the other side of one of these phone calls with a foreign partner or someone in a foreign country and the NSA or Unit 8200 has scooped that up? What do you do with that information? So it's a signal of how close these services had become that those kind of details are needing to be worked out.

• 20:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, that is an interesting tension, isn't it? What they call incidental collection, where you're not trying to collect on a particular American, for instance, but the American is talking to someone you are surveilling and therefore you get a conversation between the two parties, which is sensitive. But it is also interesting because as soon as you get that tight information sharing, you do get tensions. And I think about the US, UK relationship and, you know, one of the tensions there is, well, if you're that tightly bound and you're sharing at a kind of raw level, what happens if one side wants to use it to do something particularly aggressive? And in the UK, that became, you know, an issue.

• 20:59Speaker 00

  Gordon, you're, we would never.

• 21:01Speaker 01

  I just might suggest that after nine 11, the US became a touch more aggressive in doing things like rendition operations.

• 21:09Speaker 00

  Right.

• 21:09Speaker 01

  You know, capturing people who were then sent off to third parties to be tortured, or even this issue of drone strikes, which was quite, you know, sensitive between the US and UK. And they had to kind of put in little barriers or thoughts about that. And it sounds like it's similar with the Israelis as well, where they have to be careful because of course the Israelis are doing targeted killings and, you know, drone strikes and Israeli intelligence. So it's interesting because as soon as you get that level of raw sharing, you do get yourself into complicated questions about what it's being used for, don't you?

• 21:42Speaker 00

  Well, and indeed, that is one of the primary points of friction in that relationship is, and I think this came out during the Lebanon war, the 34 day war in 2006, where the Israelis, you know, even at that point, were relying immensely on NSA. And NSA was trying to make sure that it didn't provide information to the Israelis that could be used to, you know, conduct targeted killings in Lebanon, as an example. It's a bit different from sharing two foreign officials talking about the political environment of the country to sharing actual information that could be used to target somebody. But again, it shows how close the two sides are, that even in a case like that, where

• 22:24Speaker 00

  there's a, there's a difference of interest and opinion and how information should be used, there's ways to create frameworks in which everyone can get most of the information and kind of, you know, work through these issues.

• 22:38Speaker 01

  You manage it.

• 22:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, you manage it. You manage it, which I think is another theme of this relationship is that even when one side wants to do something that is contrary to the other side's interest, the overarching strategic interest that both sides perceive themselves to have, there's so much overlap that you can manage through unpleasantness in the relationship as a result.

• 23:02Speaker 01

  I mean, we've talked about how close on the signals intelligence side, that relationship is, what about the Cuban side? I mean, you worked at CIA, I'm not sure how much you can say about how the relationship with the liaison with your Mossad. Not much. You surprised me. But yeah, I mean, I guess it's similar, but perhaps a bit more transactional rather than the, you know, a kind of automatic raw pipe sharing as it is on the signal side.

• 23:27Speaker 00

  It's a similar dynamic when we talk about the US, UK intelligence relationship, where when you have shared signals intelligence capabilities, oftentimes the way that looks is you're pooling resources behind, you know, shared systems and facilities that you each can use. And then as a result, you get, you know, you each share the product. With human intelligence, I think it tends to be more, there's a tremendous, there is a tremendous amount of sharing, particularly of, you know, disseminated products that come from, from assets. But in terms of doing joint operations, I mean, it's, it's much more case by case. Does one side break?

• 24:10Speaker 00

  I mean, typically the way this works in the Middle East on the human side, the Israelis, this may come as a surprise to you, Gordon, the Israelis are much more adept at recruiting human assets in places like Syria and Lebanon and Iran.

• 24:24Speaker 01

  Even than the CIA.

• 24:25Speaker 00

  Than we, than we are. What we have that they tend not to have is deeper pockets and in some cases, technology that they may want to leverage and, and a global reach that they don't have because they're much more focused. And so the partnership can often look that way where the Israelis are passing us very valuable human intelligence from the region or, you know, human enabled SIGENT. And the CIA is coming with, with money and with technology and with a kind of global edge that, that Mossad doesn't have.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  So that gives us a picture, I think, of, of how the cooperation has evolved and in different areas. But recently, I think it's worth saying and exploring a little bit, just how it's got trickier, it feels like. I mean, this, this report that came out of US media in the last couple of months was that the US Defense Intelligence Agency, friends of the DIA.

• 25:23Speaker 00

  No, the DIA.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  No, they are.

• 25:26Speaker 00

  I've been adamant about this, the, the DIA are not friends of the show.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  They're not putting it in the same category as like Kim Philby or something like that. It's like, come on, let's, let's be nice to our friends at the, they wrote a report though, so we have to take it seriously because it's the premise of this idea, that there's a counterintelligence threat from Israel, which has increased and has gone from high, I think, to critical and higher than any other ally other than South Korea, which is a kind of interesting one again to explore later. But it's based, isn't it, on some incidents which have happened recently, which suggests that, you know, perhaps there's always been a degree of, as we said, friction, but also intelligence gathering, that recently it's got worse. I mean, did you ever sense the Israelis were hanging around a bit too much in the Langley cafeteria?

• 26:14Speaker 00

  The interesting thing was that we didn't let them come into the building.

• 26:20Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 26:21Speaker 00

  So we would always meet with them at various random facilities in, in Northern Virginia, kind of unmarked facilities that just happened to have someone standing outside with an M4. And they, it's, it's interesting because I had heard a story, which might be apocryphal, that the reason for this was that at one point, the Israelis had brought, there had been a Mossad liaison team that had come in and one of the guys had like gotten loose and, and was, was, was absent, kind of running around the building somewhere.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  Around Langley. Oh, I seem to have left my pen here on the desk, you know?

• 27:00Speaker 00

  That was the story I got. And I thought it was, it's a great encapsulation of the relationship because we're still sharing so much with them and they with us. And yet we have this incident where there's been an obvious kind of breach of trust. And, and as a result, we've moved all of the liaison meetings off site. Now, I also think it's interesting, the timing of the DIA report, because again, to that dynamic, and we talked, we talked about this at the beginning of the episode, the US and Israel have been fighting a war together in tandem. This unprecedented, I mean, the Israelis have military officials and officers who are sitting with their American counterparts at CENTCOM in Tampa.

• 27:42Speaker 00

  And, and at the same time, we have this report from, from the DIA come out that says the Israelis counterintelligence threat is, is elevated. And I think those two things go together, to be quite honest with you.

• 27:55Speaker 01

  I mean, it is worth saying why the Israelis, who of course will deny, we should say, are doing this, why they'd want to do it. And the answer is actually, it's kind of, in a sense, because they are so closely tied with the US in a war, you want to know, for instance, is the US really committed to this war? How far is it willing to go? Is it thinking about negotiating with Iran or backing out of the war? All those things have a huge impact for Israel's security posture. And so you have a, a strong interest in knowing what's going on within the US system. You know, what's going on when the US and Iran talk directly, which they always do, without the Israelis being in the room, what's really going on? You know, are they cutting a deal which is going to undermine us?

• 28:39Speaker 01

  You can absolutely see why that is an urgent intelligence collection priority for the Israelis. And you could probably get a lot of that information, can't you, from liaison and from talking to people and having good contacts in the White House and Capitol Hill. But there's a certain bit of it which intelligence can give you and which you might want to get.

• 28:59Speaker 00

  I mean, intelligence is the gathering, not just the stealing of, of secrets, right? And by definition, if the Israelis are getting a set of talking points, or frankly, if, if Witkoff is going and talking to the Israelis and saying, here's what happened.

• 29:19Speaker 00

  The Israelis, do they trust him? Are there, are there pieces of this? Is he telling them the truth, but not the whole truth? Is he misrepresenting things? All of these, so, so those are secrets that they would, the, you know, Mossad or United 200 would want to steal. I also think that the Israelis have probably been aided by the fact that many officials in the Trump administration are using their personal phones, they're flying on private aircraft, they're not, it seems, using staffing from US embassies abroad. So there's a bunch of reasons why the negotiating team in this case would also be particularly vulnerable to foreign intelligence agencies targeting them.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  It's very tempting, almost because it's easier than normal.

• 30:01Speaker 00

  Right.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  You know, because to get it, you don't have to try that hard to get some of that stuff. So you can see the temptation to do it. But it is worth saying, isn't it? There is a history of this. So it's not as if it's new, the idea that Israel might be collecting against the US, is it? There's lots of cases.

• 30:18Speaker 00

  We'll talk about the Pollard case, but that's not, that's not a lone wolf either. I mean, there's cases from the eighties where, you know, an engineer at the US Army's Armament Research Center provided classified documents allegedly to the Israelis. There's another one from the nineties, US naval engineer investigated by the FBI on suspicion of passing classified data to Israeli liaison officers. Mid 2000s, there's a Pentagon analyst who passed classified US policy documents on Iran to AIPAC staffers in the US.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  That's the Israeli lobby group, yeah.

• 30:52Speaker 00

  Right. And who were then accused of relaying that to Israeli diplomats. The Snowden leaks, when those came out, showed a 2013 national intelligence estimate that ranked Israel the third most aggressive intelligence service against the US, behind only China and Russia.

• 31:08Speaker 01

  That's staggering, isn't it? I mean, that's amazing, isn't it? The third most aggressive intelligence service against the US.

• 31:13Speaker 00

  The other piece of this is that they are an extremely capable intelligence service as well. So the capability, the aggression, the propensity to take risk, all of these things that we've, we've talked about, these traits in other episodes of this pod, we talk about targeted killings in Iran, for example. I mean, the Israelis bring the same, it's the same intelligence culture, I think, when they look at the US. You know, so, so it, in some ways, it shouldn't be surprising. There was, there was a 2019 report that came out that the Israelis were behind the emplacement of cellphone surveillance devices that were found near the White House and other locations around Washington.

• 31:52Speaker 00

  In 2021, Israeli military intelligence officers were caught planting listening devices at DIA headquarters.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 32:00Speaker 00

  I mean, you know, pretty, pretty crazy. In 2025, officers from Shin Bet, which is Israel's domestic intelligence agency, were reportedly discovered to have tried to plant a listening device in a secret service vehicle that was obviously in Israel. So this is a trend.

• 32:18Speaker 01

  There's a trend. There's a trend. I mean, I remember discovering a story that back in the nineties, Israel had found a way to get hold of the phone call records from the US, but also the UK. They'd found a very interesting way to basically scoop up all that data, which included, you know, was someone from the White House calling someone they shouldn't do? You know, all that kind of data, and it was dealt with very quietly at that point by both countries. And I think that's one of the, you know, tendencies you see is that it happens, people get caught, and then it tends to get dealt with quietly, as, as it happened in that case. But I should just raise the possibility, David, that it might not be entirely a one-way street. I mean, is it plausible that the, the US could be spying on Israel, on its friend, its ally?

• 33:03Speaker 00

  Yes, obviously. And I think, I think, you know, there, there, there are recent reports, for example, about the US and British intelligence, apparently, and again, I, I'm not sure if these are corroborated, but apparently hacking into Israeli drone feeds to try to monitor incursions during Israel's war in Gaza. The bigger one, though, the bigger one is Iran. And it's what are the Israeli intentions? And in particular, before the war, there would have been a tremendous interest in Washington in knowing if the Israelis were planning to strike Iran's nuclear facilities.

• 33:39Speaker 01

  Or whether they're bluffing, for instance. How serious are the intentions? Yeah.

• 33:42Speaker 00

  Exactly. And there, there are leaked documents from 2008, 2011, that period, I think some from the Snowden trove, that show the US and GCHQ, Gordon, spying on emails connected to the Israeli Prime Minister's office, the Defence Minister's office, and several Israeli embassies. Shocking. The operation apparently had some fun code names, Braddock and Carboy. And it was run supposedly from a shared NSA/GCHQ listening post on the Atlantic coast of Britain. I wonder what facility that would be, Gordon, or maybe if you've visited it.

• 34:25Speaker 01

  An Atlantic coast facility? The, I mean, there is a place called GCHQ Bude, which is on the Atlantic coast, kind of Cornwall way, which I have visited, and a, a big satellite dishes and satellite domes. I got taken inside for a program on GCHQ a while back. But I'm shocked, I'm shocked again to think that spying might have been going on at that station and that they might have actually, you know, when they toured me around and told me these big satellite dishes, they might have actually been scooping up someone's communications and listening to it.

• 34:55Speaker 00

  What are these dishes doing, guys?

• 34:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, what are these dishes doing?

• 34:57Speaker 00

  These giant dishes pointed at the sky, toward in the general direction of the Middle East.

• 35:02Speaker 01

  It is a beautiful place, by the way. If you ever get the chance, David and listeners, to, to, to visit GCHQ Bude, lovely walks by the coast. You can go take a coastal walk and then see these massive satellite intercept facilities and are perched over the ocean looking at the sky. It's amazing. But yes, I think it is entirely plausible that there might be a bit of that going on.

• 35:21Speaker 00

  Apparently from that facility, Gordon, the NSA and GCHQ had hacked the international mobile roaming system that allowed them to intercept texts and calls from various smartphones connected to, to Israeli leaders. And, and there are reports that the US and Britain, because the Israelis, when this, when these reports came out, the Israelis said, oh, these are useless, like, government emails that no one, there's nothing sensitive on these at all. And further, we question the veracity of all the reporting. And it does seem that the US and Britain may have had the ability to eavesdrop inside the internal communication system that the Israeli Prime Minister was using. And again, you can, you can see how Washington and London in those years

• 36:06Speaker 00

  would have a shared interest in understanding if the Israelis were serious about a strike on Iran or whether they were, to your point, bluffing.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I think that, that's absolutely right. I do just note, David, that you are citing quite a lot of material that comes from the Snowden documents. And so, you know, for all your dismissals of our friend Ed, you suddenly are quite happy to kind of, you know, quote from his material when it comes to, to telling a story. But, you know, anyway, let just, just thought I'd just note that as we move onwards.

• 36:34Speaker 00

  Should we not use all of the leaked documents once they're leaked, Gordon? Maybe we shouldn't.

• 36:38Speaker 01

  I'm just, I'm just noting for our audience who remember your disdain for Snowden, I've just, just noted.

• 36:45Speaker 00

  Ed, if you're out there, I hope that, I hope, I hope that your shin splints have healed, buddy, you know, and that you're doing okay in Moscow. I hope it's, I hope it's going great.

• 36:54Speaker 01

  So anyway, back, the context is important though, isn't it? Because as we said, a lot of this has been about Iran, hasn't it? And about the tensions over Iran. And, and I think it's, you know, there's an interesting story that, that the NSA, I think in 2014, intercepts material which shows that Israel was spying on the US in its negotiations about Iran. So, you know, there's, you keep the kind of circularity of it, spies spying on spies, spying on spies. But that, that I think goes back to this idea that Iran has been at the crux of perhaps, to some extent, the, the closeness today, but also the tension between the two sides. Because when the US and Iran were going through the talks, which eventually led to the, you know,

• 37:37Speaker 01

  the Iran nuclear deal, the so-called JCPOA, Benjamin Netanyahu has always been opposed to that. And so certainly had an interest in spying on that and seeing what he could find out. And perhaps, I think what's interesting is not just spying on it, but also, you know, using that intelligence.

• 37:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, this was a particularly uncomfortable story when, when it broke. I think the Wall Street Journal broke the story. And I should say that the Journal ran kind of two separate, parallel investigations. One looking at the US spying at Israel and the other one looking at Israel spying on the US in this period, which, which I would definitely commend to listeners. But, you know, in 2015, as the Obama administration is negotiating the nuclear deal, the Israelis, your point, huge interest in understanding what sort of deal might be cut.

• 38:27Speaker 00

  The Israelis probably don't want the US cutting kind of a separate agreement with Tehran in the first place. And Netanyahu, at this point, is waging, back in 2015, is waging basically an open PR campaign against the deal, which very famously commited in him speaking to a joint US session of Congress without the White House's agreement or perhaps foreknowledge. So the Obama administration was irate, and this was done, I believe it was organized by then Speaker of the House John Boehner, Republican, and obviously opponent of the Obama administration. So there's this kind of acrimony between the two leaders personally.

• 39:11Speaker 00

  There's also this potential divergence of interest that the Israelis don't want there to be a diplomatic solution anchored with the Iranians. And apparently, Gordon, you'll be shocked to hear, the Israelis were spying on the negotiating teams. It was a mix of eavesdropping-

• 39:31Speaker 01

  Shocked.

• 39:32Speaker 00

  -information that they acquired from confidential US briefings, maybe some human intelligence and diplomatic contacts in Europe. And I think it's fascinating because those talks were being conducted under this architecture of what was called the P5 plus one, which was the US, UK, France, Russia, China, and Germany. And the Israelis, as they're collecting all this information on the US negotiation and, you know, the team, the Israelis apparently sent a delegation to meet with the French and British negotiating teams and then use the information gleaned from that to later argue that all of the information they had gotten was coming from diplomatic contacts in Europe and had not actually been stolen from the US negotiating team.

• 40:17Speaker 00

  So in other words, we're not spying on you directly, we're just sort of getting all this from, you know, having canapes in Paris, you know?

• 40:24Speaker 01

  And planting a computer virus supposedly even at the hotels hosting the negotiations, which is pretty direct. But it is interesting, isn't it? Because it's there, they're gathering intelligence, and then they're running an influence campaign in Washington to pressure Congress, to pressure people to go against the deal. So you can see there the real tensions in the relationship. But of course, we should say, throughout it all, Israel has consistently denied spying on the US and that there's no intention or order to do so, isn't there?

• 40:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, Netanyahu frequently says that he has a directive, some kind of mysterious directive, that there should be no intelligence work at the US, no spying on the US-

• 41:03Speaker 01

  None.

• 41:04Speaker 00

  -vehemently denies it. I mean, I think the US would similarly, maybe not as vehemently, but would deny that we're collecting on the Israelis. And so we have this, you know, very interesting situation where there's an intense closeness, there's a lot of spying on each other where interests might diverge, and there's a sort of public calm to all of it in which both sides deny that they would ever spy on one another.

• 41:32Speaker 01

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• 41:34Speaker 00

  I know.

• 41:35Speaker 01

  I'm shocked that spies would spy on each other. Okay, well, at that point, let's take a break, and when we come back, we'll look at the Jonathan Pollard affair, perhaps, I think, the most notorious and fascinating episode in this unusual spy relationship.

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• 44:05Speaker 01

  Well, welcome back as we dive deep into the US-Israel intelligence relationship and whether they could possibly spy on each other. Let's set up this very interesting individual, Jonathan Pollard, who is going to be, you know, I think, a big figure in the relationship right up to today, isn't he, David?

• 44:27Speaker 00

  I think more than anybody else, he casts a very long shadow over the US-Israel spy relationship. And I think we will see in his story a lot of the dynamics that we've been talking about and how the spy relationship actually works. So let's set up Pollard, the man. He's born in 1954. He's one of three children, raised in South Bend, Indiana. His father was an award-winning microbiologist who taught at Notre Dame. By his family's own account, Pollard's childhood is tough. He complains constantly of being picked on in high school, he's beaten up, and seems that it's because he's Jewish.

• 45:09Speaker 00

  One of the happiest stretches of his childhood, though, comes at 16, when he attends a summer camp for gifted children in Israel. Pollard goes to Stanford, by all accounts is a capable student, but also a very heavy drug and alcohol user. And as it turns out, he is an emotionally unstable fabulist, which is quite the cocktail that we've got brewing here. Former classmates at Stanford will end up telling investigators that Pollard had all of these stories about his ties to Mossad, right? So he's been to Israel by this point. He's claiming he's an Israeli spy, is an operative.

• 45:54Speaker 00

  In one case, he waves a pistol in the air and screams that people are out to get him. So you have this kind of emerging brew of fabulism and emotional instability that are pretty gratter to him. After Stanford, he kind of drifts, ends up attending several graduate schools, including Tufts at Fletcher's, their School of Law and Diplomacy. And I think you can kind of see between his time at Israel and the graduate study, which is in international relations, he's got some intellectual interest in the wider world, although he never earns a graduate degree from any of the institutions he attends.

• 46:31Speaker 01

  Emotionally unstable fabulist, sounds perfect for the US intelligence community at this time, David. And he actually tries to join the CIA in 1977.

• 46:41Speaker 00

  He does.

• 46:42Speaker 01

  And amazingly, given what we now know about the CIA and the people it recruits, including people who stash away $42 million in gold bars in their homes, he gets turned down.

• 46:50Speaker 00

  So hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. Most people don't steal 42 million in gold bars.

• 46:54Speaker 01

  Okay, sorry.

• 46:55Speaker 00

  Or wind up committing espionage with the Israelis.

• 47:00Speaker 01

  Okay, okay, I take that back.

• 47:02Speaker 00

  So what we focus, you know, we do, we focus on the bad eggs a lot on The Rest Is Classified. We need to have, you know what we need to do is we need to have a story about someone who just has a kind of boring career where they don't, where they don't commit treason. But they tend to be, the stories aren't as great. But the CIA says no, Gordon, the CIA turns him down. Apparently, he's turned down after his polygraph and background investigation lead the agency to conclude, as one official has said, that he was a blabbermouth who also misrepresented his drug use. So where does he go? Goes to the Navy, right? He lands a civilian job as a research analyst in what was called the Field Operational Intelligence

• 47:46Speaker 00

  Office in Sutland, Maryland. This is in September of 1979. Now, that job requires a TSSCI, a top secret security clearance. This reminds me of the Snowden affair, Gordon, where when investigators run the background investigation on Pollard, the Navy investigators, the CIA does not pass along the judgments on Pollard that it had derived from its polygraph and background investigation, which is poor form. Now, Pollard, his work is focused on, this is very specific, surface ship systems in non-communist navies, which feels-

• 48:26Speaker 00

  Maybe slightly

• 48:27Speaker 01

  niche?

• 48:28Speaker 00

  niche or third tier, but he's by his superior's accounts quite good at the job. Now, the fabulism, the fantasist inside Pollard, though, just can't help himself because at Sutland, at this naval facility, he will repeatedly tell colleagues stories about his ties to Assad and his supposed work as an operative in the Middle East. And there is a great anecdote from a guy named Lieutenant Commander David Muller in the Navy. He has, Muller has a job opening and he, he has an interview with Pollard. Pollard is interviewing for this job and Pollard comes in early on Monday boarding. Pollard arrives for his interview unshaven, looking like he hadn't slept.

• 49:11Speaker 00

  And he explains that the reason for this is that on Friday, his fiance, a woman named Anne Henderson, who will play a role in this story, had been kidnapped by IRA operatives in Washington. And he's, Pollard claimed that he had spent the entire weekend chasing the kidnappers and had only rescued her in the early hours of Monday boarding and then presumably had come to the interview, which is why he looked like hell.

• 49:38Speaker 01

  He's Jack Ryan.

• 49:39Speaker 00

  He's Jack Ryan.

• 49:40Speaker 01

  That is a crazy story. I mean, that should raise some red flags. I mean, or at least lead you to check out the fact that his wife or his fiance has been kidnapped. But anyway, it doesn't. So he, he's, he's still there. It's wild, isn't it?

• 49:54Speaker 00

  Yes. Yeah, I think it's fair to say Pollard is not a member of the reality-based community. Okay. So that's, the reality-based community is a, you know, it's, it's a shrinking

• 50:03Speaker 01

  It's one we try and, we try and, we try, we try and be part of it.

• 50:06Speaker 00

  No. We try our best. Now, so in addition to that, Pollard has money problems. One of the FBI investigators who did a damage assessment on Pollard told Seymour Hersh, investigative reporter, and Hersh wrote a long New Yorker article on the case, which is actually quite good. Pollard is apparently broke. Credit card debts, loans, debts on rent, furniture, he's got car, car loans. He's borrowing from colleagues, but he's still spending really lavishly on food, on drugs, he's racking up big bar bills. And so he's, you know, already, you don't have to be a particularly adept student of

• 50:51Speaker 00

  human nature to realize that Jonathan Pollard would be primed for recruitment by the Israeli intelligence service, should it become interested in him. And you'd also think that maybe with all of these warning signs, Pollard's career would come off the rails and the Navy would, would fire him. They don't. After the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, the Navy stands up what was called an anti-terrorist alert center at Sutland, at the facility where Pollard works. Pollard is assigned to its threat analysis division, which further broadens his access inside naval intelligence.

• 51:28Speaker 01

  He is clearly a, you know, unstable fabulist with debts and access to secrets, who, who is a perfect target for an intelligence, you know, pitch. But he is actually going to offer himself, isn't he? So it's not a pitch that comes to him. He makes the decision, which I guess is true of lots of spies. But that's an important part of the story, isn't it? Because it is not the Israelis going out hunting for him. He's going to come to them.

• 51:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, Pollard raises his hand and he, he makes this decision. He gets in touch with an Israeli official through an activist that he knew, who's an old family friend. And the Israeli official that Pollard eventually contacts is a guy named Colonel Avi M. Sela, who is on leave in the US. He's actually studying for a doctorate, I believe in computer science. And so Sela has this outreach from Pollard. He knows Pollard's a naval intelligence analyst. And Sela will go to the Israeli consulate of New York and basically say, am I okay to talk to this guy? And he, he clears the meeting with Pollard with the science counselor at the consulate

• 52:40Speaker 00

  of New York and we'll come back to who the science counselor actually is in a moment. Sela and Pollard end up scheduling a meeting at a coffee shop inside the Hilton off Connecticut Avenue in Washington DC. And I think this, it's, it's amusing for me to imagine these two guys sitting together because I don't think you could have more contrast between two people if you tried. Pollard is this kind of rumpled, sort of chubby-cheeked analyst who's kind of a social outcast, right? And Sela is this articulate, athletic, he's a former fighter pilot, who is also something of an Israeli national hero. Sela has seen combat in the 67 war and 73.

• 53:24Speaker 00

  He had participated in the mission to destroy Saddam's nuclear reactor. And this is important, Sela, even though he's awesome, is not an intelligence officer, right? He is a, he's a pilot and he's currently, at this point in time, a student who spends a lot of his time in the States helping Israel in New York, giving talks about his combat missions. And then after the talks, money is raised for Israeli bonds. So I think both guys are probably a little bit, I don't know if Sela's nervous, but you know, it's kind of out of their comfort zone. This is not normally what they do. Pollard is wowed by Sela's combat record.

• 54:07Speaker 00

  The fact that he shot down these Soviet piloted MiGs over the Suez in 69. Pollard apparently says, you know, anyone who's killed Russians is fine by me and really decides that he likes Sela. And Pollard, he just starts to reel off the information that he can get. He's obviously, he's got that TSSCI clearance. He can get material that's housed at DIA, CIA, NSA, you know, the National Photographic Interpretation Center, where they do all the imagery analysis. And Pollard tells Sela that his ultimate goal is to save Israel from another war. Pollard also says he wants to immigrate to Israel eventually, but in the meantime, he'll work for Israel inside US intelligence, then eventually he'll leave.

• 54:52Speaker 00

  Sela at first wonders if it's a setup, which I think is a good instinct, you know, is this, it could, it feels almost too good to be true. But he eventually comes to believe that Pollard is legit, but you know, he's, Sela's smart and, and he'll eventually set up a test for Pollard where he'll say, look, I want you to bring me anything you can get on Saudi and Soviet air defense systems. And as a bonus, can you produce satellite photos of the damage at Osirak, the Saddam's nuclear reactor that had been destroyed by the Israelis? Those are sensitive. And obviously the Israelis would have their own perspective on the damage assessment. They could compare the things to check. They also set up a commo plan at the meeting.

• 55:36Speaker 00

  Sela says, well, why don't we use payphones near your apartment? And to give you a sense of just how sort of excited and kind of squirrely Pollard is, Pollard at the meeting literally stands up and runs out and comes back 20 minutes later. He leaves Sela sitting there in the coffee shop, comes back 20 minutes later with the phone numbers for the payphones scribbled on a piece of paper, hands them over to Sela and Sela assigns each phone a one-letter code from the Hebrew alphabet. So the plan is that to contact Pollard, he will call Pollard at home. He'll say a Hebrew letter, feels like he would have chosen a different language where you're trying to mask, mask the source of the espionage. And then Pollard would hang up and then go to the magic payphone and, and wait for the

• 56:21Speaker 00

  call from Sela. So Pollard leaves the meeting and he goes home and tells his girlfriend Anne Henderson, who is an accomplice in the story, we should say.

• 56:30Speaker 01

  And has not been kidnapped by IRA operatives, we should also say.

• 56:33Speaker 00

  And, and was, was rescued, was rescued by Pollard in the, in early Monday morning from IRA operatives. So she, Anne Henderson is, is convinced, or has encouraged Pollard to do this. You know, the money piece of this, there's been some debate in the years since this case of, of how much of his motivation is ideological and how much of it is that he's got crushing money problems and needs to find a way to earn some extra cash.

• 56:58Speaker 01

  It's often both, isn't it?

• 56:59Speaker 00

  Yeah. But you know, it's, it's a both and situation. And Pollard leaves thinking, well, okay, the Israelis will eventually pay me, even though he and Sela at this first meeting don't discuss payment at all. And within a few months, Pollard and Anne, they're both kind of a team in this, fly to Paris to meet Sela. And over several days in Paris, they hammer out the operational plans, the compensation, the taskings, the things that the Israelis are particularly interested in. The Israelis basically cover all of Pollard and Anne's expenses, hand over a bunch of cash. Sela buys an expensive ring for Pollard to give to Anne.

• 57:39Speaker 00

  And the espionage is consummated between John Pollard and the Israelis.

• 57:47Speaker 01

  But it's not going to last for long and it's going to end in not just disaster for them, but actually quite a significant incident, which is going to have reverberations through the decades for the US-Israel relationship and even get caught up with negotiations with the Palestinians, among other issues. So let's stop there. And when we come back for part two, we'll see what happens with Pollard, with his espionage, how the net closes around him and what the fallout really is. So do join us next time. But of course, a reminder, if you want to hear that right away, you can join the Declassified Club at therestisclassified.com. Lots of other goodies there, including ad-free listening and early access to all our series.

• 58:31Speaker 01

  And of course, please do sign up for our newsletter, which you could also do there. But otherwise, see you next time.

• 58:37Speaker 00

  We'll see you next time.

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