The Pentagon's Defence Intelligence Agency raised the threat to 'critical', upgrading its counterintelligence assessment of Israel from the previous 'high' designation, in recent weeks. The assessment, first reported by NBC News on June 6 and confirmed by the New York Times the following day, was built around a seven-page document rating Israel's human and technical intelligence-gathering capabilities at the highest possible level. The officials targeted by Israeli intelligence included Steve Witkoff and Elbridge Colby: Witkoff is Trump's chief Iran negotiator, Colby the Pentagon's top policy official and Michael DiMino one of Colby's senior deputies. What Israeli intelligence was trying to learn was Washington's negotiating position in talks with Iran.
Tomorrow, in Geneva, Witkoff will attend the formal signing of the agreement ending the war. The country that was listening to his phone calls is not at the table.
Washington and Jerusalem have long maintained what officials describe as a tacit, mutually tolerated understanding: they spy on each other and neither makes too much noise about it. Jonathan Pollard established the outer limits of that tolerance. He passed thousands of classified American documents to Israeli handlers in the 1980s, pleaded guilty and served thirty years in prison before Israel finally acknowledged it had run him as an agent. He became the reference point for every subsequent Israeli spying allegation, the benchmark for how far was too far. The Pollard case took thirty years to be officially acknowledged. The current assessment was circulated in weeks.
This time, American officials say Israel crossed the line. The New York Times quoted officials saying that an intensified Israeli effort to learn about US positions in talks with Iran had gone beyond what the relationship permits. The distinction matters. Both sides accept espionage as background noise. What exceeded tolerance was surveillance targeted specifically at America's attempts to make peace with a country Israel wanted Washington to keep fighting. The seven-page assessment was not produced because Israel had been caught spying. It was produced because the target of the spying was the peace process Israel was trying to prevent.
Netanyahu publicly opposed the Iran deal. He called for military action to resume. He rejected the ceasefire framework while American diplomats were still at the table. And while those diplomats were there, Israeli intelligence was attempting to read their positions before they played them. The ally that went to war alongside the United States was running surveillance on the Americans who were trying to end that war. The intelligence sharing between the two countries continued on a daily basis throughout the same period.
That last detail is the one worth sitting with. The United States and Israel were sharing intelligence daily while Israel was simultaneously targeting the American negotiators. Washington knew and continued. The relationship was conducting espionage and cooperation simultaneously, through the same channels, toward different ends. There is a word for that arrangement. It is not a flattering one.
The DIA's 'critical' designation is not a rupture. It is a description. It describes a relationship in which one party uses the other's intelligence infrastructure, funds its military, absorbs its political costs and discovers, in the fine print, that the same partner has been reading its mail while the peace deal was being made. Washington calls this relationship a cornerstone of its Middle East policy. Its own intelligence agency calls it a critical threat.
Both are correct. The question is which word applies when.
