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Israeli Ambassador Daniel Ayalon denies all charges of espionage against the United States.
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| By israelinsider staff September 3, 2004 |
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The Los Angeles Times ran a front page article filled with unnamed government officials attacking alleged espionage operations which Israel is supposedly running in the United States and against American officials and delegations traveling in Israel.
"There is a huge, aggressive, ongoing set of Israeli activities directed against the United States," the L.A. Times quoted a recently retired former intelligence official as saying. "Anybody who worked in counterintelligence in a professional capacity will tell you the Israelis are among the most aggressive and active countries targeting the United States."
The former official discounted repeated Israeli denials that the country exceeded acceptable limits to obtain information.
"They undertake a wide range of technical operations and human operations," the former official said. "People here as liaison aggressively pursue classified intelligence from people. The denials are laughable."
The Times also quoted a former senior intelligence official, who focused on Middle East issues, who said Israel tried to recruit him as a spy in 1991.
"I had an Israeli intelligence officer pitch me in Washington at the time of the first Gulf War," he said. "I said, 'No, go away,' and reported it to counterintelligence."
The Times said that U.S. diplomats, military officers and other officials are routinely warned before going to Israel that local agents are known to slip into homes and hotel rooms of visiting delegations to go through briefcases and to copy computer files.
"Any official American in the intelligence community or in the foreign service gets all these briefings on all the things the Israelis are going to try to do to you," another U.S. official reportedly said.
The U.S. officials all insisted on anonymity, the Times said, "because classified material was involved and because of the political sensitivity of Israeli relations with Washington." It added that "Congress has shown little appetite for vigorous investigations of alleged Israeli spying."
At the same time, the report raised the question of why Israel would even need to spy in the U.S. since it obtained most intelligence with the full knowledge and consent of the Americans.
Experts said relations between the CIA and Israel's overseas intelligence agency, the Mossad, were so close that analysts sometimes shared highly classified "code-word" intelligence on sensitive subjects. Tel Aviv routinely informs Washington of the identities of the Mossad station chief and the military intelligence liaison at its embassy in the United States.
"They probably get 98% of everything they want handed to them on a weekly basis," said the former senior U.S. intelligence officer, who worked closely with Israeli intelligence. "They're very active allies. They're treated the way the British are."
A Bush administration official confirmed that Israel ran intelligence operations in the United States, but said that most countries did as well. "I don't know of any foreign government that doesn't do collection in Washington," he said.
In his first public comments on the case, Israel's ambassador Daniel Ayalon repeated his government's denials. "I can tell you here, very authoritatively, very categorically, Israel does not spy on the United States," Ayalon told CNN. "We do not gather information on our best friend and ally." Ayalon said his government had been "very assured that this thing will just fizzle out. There's nothing there."
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