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FBI investigating alleged leaks of US documents on Israeli war plan

VaselineOctober 23, 2024

0 4 minutes read

FBI investigating alleged leaks of US documents on Israeli war plan

Perry Stein, Michael Birnbaum
| WashingtonPost

The FBI announced Tuesday that it is investigating an alleged leak of top-secret U.S. intelligence documents, days after assessments containing information about Israel’s possible plans for a retaliatory attack on Iran were published on an Iran-linked Telegram account.

“The FBI is investigating the alleged leak of classified documents and is working closely with our partners in the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community,” the FBI said in a statement. “As this is an ongoing investigation, we have no further comment.”

White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters Monday that it was unclear whether the documents were made public through a leak or a hack. He said the government does not expect additional classified information to be released without authorization.

Early this month, Iran fired a barrage of nearly 200 ballistic missiles into Israel, a response to the assassinations of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in July and Hezbollah chief Hasan Nasrallah in Beirut in September. Tehran has since been preparing for a retaliatory attack.

Kirby said Monday that President Joe Biden is “deeply concerned” about any leak of classified material.

“That shouldn’t happen, and it’s unacceptable if it does,” Kirby said. “And you can be assured that he will be actively monitoring the progress of the investigative efforts to find out how this happened, and obviously he will be very interested in hearing any mitigation measures and recommendations that arise from the investigative efforts and how you can prevent it from happening again.”

Kirby said the Biden administration had communicated with the Israeli government about the disclosure.

The intelligence assessment shows that the US government believes Israel is preparing a major attack against Iran, which would be retaliation for a massive Iranian ballistic missile attack on Israel on October 1. The Biden administration has urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to launch an attack alone. a limited response that would not provoke another Iranian retaliation in an effort to prevent a regional war.

US officials have pushed Netanyahu to focus on Iranian military targets, and not on Iranian energy infrastructure or sites linked to its nuclear program, which would be much more sensitive. Any attack on Iranian oil facilities could also disrupt the US elections on November 5 by creating a spike in energy prices.

The leaked assessment focused on US observations of Israeli airfield activity on Tuesday and Wednesday of last week, which they said were consistent with long-range strike exercises that would require mid-air refueling, something that would be necessary if Israeli fighter jets were to launch attacks on Iran . The assessment also discussed the movement of ammunition carts at Israeli airports. Two related documents were posted to the Telegram account, both dated last Wednesday.

An Israeli official said the government does not believe the disclosed information will affect its planning for possible actions against Iran, but the event has raised security concerns. “The content is not that important,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. “The fact that there was a leak is much more important.”

The leak has rattled the Biden administration, which remains on edge over previous major intelligence disclosures, including a slew of classified documents posted to the Discord messaging platform last year.

“We take these things very seriously, very, very seriously, and we investigate things if there is an incident,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters in Poland on Monday. He declined to comment on a specific investigation.

Last year’s disclosure on Discord involved hundreds of classified documents. A member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, Jack Teixeira, 22, pleaded guilty in March to a series of charges, including intentionally retaining and transmitting national defense information that the government had classified as top secret.

The Air Force disciplined 15 other pilots in that case after a service investigation found that a “lack of oversight” and a “culture of complacency” at Teixeira’s unit at Otis Air National Guard Base on Cape Cod played a role in the leak. Teixeira, who held a junior rank of enlisted airman first class, had significant access to classified systems and had been observed acting suspiciously on a number of occasions without alerting appropriate authorities, the investigation found.

A US official said that while any intelligence leak is serious, the analysis published on the Iran-linked Telegram channel is likely to lead to only limited diplomatic fallout, provided no more material is released.

Analysis based on satellite imagery is inherently less sensitive than intercepted communications, information provided by spies located within foreign governments, or information shared by other countries with the U.S. intelligence community, the official said. Foreign governments know that the U.S. government has satellites that can do a good job of detecting just about anything that happens out in the open, the official said.

The leaked analysis also contained no actual images, but only text, limiting the public’s ability to accurately understand the capabilities of US spy satellites. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal considerations about the leak.

A spokeswoman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment.

Any investigation into such a leak will start at the originating agency—in this case the Defense Department’s National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which is charged with operating the intelligence community’s spy satellites—and work outward in concentric circles to determine who the spy satellites would have access to the secret document.

Even if the leaked assessment is based primarily on satellite images, it still provides a window into an unusually candid discussion about the U.S. intelligence community’s stance toward Israel, a former analyst said. And in saying that there is no indication that Israel plans to use a nuclear weapon against Iran, it makes a rare admission of Israel’s nuclear weapons program, which neither the United States nor the Israeli government has ever publicly acknowledged.

“The leaked assessment shows how closely the intelligence community is monitoring Israeli military activities,” said Harrison Mann, a former analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency who resigned in protest of the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza.

It is “a reminder that the administration does not really trust Israel to share plans and major operations in advance. It shows that the US government recognizes and controls Israel’s nuclear forces.”

Mann also noted that the assessment found that analysts “apparently used satellite imagery to track a ‘dolly,’ a cart used to transport missiles that is about half as long and half as wide as a sedan, long enough to deduce that a specific type of missile was about to be loaded on Israeli fighters.”

___

John Hudson and Dan Lamothe in Washington; Missy Ryan in Rzeszow, Poland; and Steve Hendrix in Tel Aviv contributed to this report.

VaselineOctober 23, 2024

0 4 minutes read

Vaseline

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