The affair of the soldier to be indicted on Sunday in military court over alleged intelligence leaks to right-wing friends reflects the difficulty the Israel Defense Forces Military Intelligence has, as opposed to smaller agencies like the Shin Bet security service or the Mossad, in protecting classified information.

MI is more vulnerable to leaks because of its broader contact with the outside world. Civilians, new draftees, reserve soldiers – every year more and more people are added to the circle of those exposed to its secrets.

It seems that the case of the soldier, Ya’akov Sela, shows weaknesses in the system that might be quite common. Relatively rapid initial security vetting, which is not always sufficient to uncover potential security risks; too loose supervision of those already in the intelligence system and who are considered “one of us”; and a lack of strict compartmentalization in day to day work.

Sela was inducted into the army's program for ultra-Orthodox soldiers, in which great efforts are made to satisfy the needs of the draftees. He was relatively old, 25, married and a father, had medical problems, and was stationed at a base a few minutes away from his home in the settlement of Bat Ayin. (The fact that a settler from an ultra-Orthodox, nationalistic background was drafted into a program designed for ultra-Orthodox full-time yeshiva students shows the broad interpretation the IDF gives to the term “ultra-Orthodox,” and the possibility that the number of “authentic” ultra-Orthodox serving in the army may be lower than the army claims.)

Ideal location for leaker

The Bat Ayin soldier's convenient assignment to brigade headquarters placed him in an ideal location to collect intelligence information relevant to his friends, who belong to the extreme wing of settlers.

Sela was in charge of collecting intelligence about the Palestinians, but the Shin Bet and police say he spent a significant amount of time looking into investigations involving so-called “price tag” attacks – violent attacks by settlers against Palestinian, Christian, left-wing Jewish and occasionally army targets – and preparations for the dismantling of illegal settlement construction.

Because of weaknesses in compartmentalization, it seems Sela was able to obtain a good deal of information without his commanders noticing it in time. Only when police in the Judea and Samaria district became suspicious was the leak discovered and the soldier arrested.

There have been a few cases in the past of operations and intelligence sergeants in West Bank brigades who were suspected of leaking information, mainly about the evacuation of outposts. About four years ago, when the commander of the IDF forces in the West Bank, Maj. Gen. Nitzan Alon, dared hint that greater care was needed in the sharing of sensitive information of this type, a campaign was launched against him in the settlements that ended only toward the end of his term as general in charge of Central Command.

The number of settler-soldiers involved in such leaks is apparently very small, but the system is not built to find them ahead of time or monitor them during their service – just as the system had difficulty discovering the leak of documents by the soldier Anat Kam from the office of Yair Naveh, the general in charge of Central Command at the time.

Clearly the arrest of one suspect should not disqualify soldiers who live in settlements from serving in sensitive posts. But the Sela affair should certainly alert the army that convenient postings close to home should not be the only consideration in intelligence assignments. Moreover, the affair should also lead to improved monitoring so that curiosity, or worse, ideological tendencies, do not expose soldiers to information to which they are not meant to have access.