May 14, 2014

My colleague Ben Caspit wondered this week in Al-Monitor whether those providing the information, or maybe fiction, regarding Israeli spying on the United States are connected to senior officials in the US government.

If indeed the White House, Pentagon or State Department decided to taint the relationship between Washington and Israel, this should worry Israeli citizens no less than the threat of an Iranian nuclear bomb. Even if the Barack Obama administration is not party to this conspiracy, however, it is not enough to placate those seeking to help Israel. Why did the editors of an esteemed American magazine like Newsweek choose to publish a story that harms the Israeli-US relationship despite the vigorous denials of the highest diplomatic and security echelons in Israel? How did it come to pass that those very senior echelons are less credible than a dubious journalistic story about a man in an air-conditioning duct?

For that matter, a new book published in the United States, “Manufactured Crisis,” by Gareth Porter, contends that in 2002, Mossad planted fabricated documents on a laptop about the uranium enrichment facilities in Natanz. According to Porter, these documents were the basis for the US-Israeli claim that Iran misled the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for two decades. He quotes a retired senior German official telling him that an activist in the Mojahedin-e-Khalq (an organization that worked for Saddam Hussein against the Iranian regime and had close ties with Mossad) had given the documents to German intelligence. Porter contends that the IAEA's report from 2003 relied on these same documents. The neoconservatives in Washington, who sought to overthrow the regime in Iran, rushed to spread the sensational headline of the report via the global press, according to which Tehran had for 18 years hidden a comprehensive plan to develop a nuclear weapon. The organization’s inspectors determined within a few months that the information on Natanz was baseless.

The official American intelligence assessment published in 2007 reported the high likelihood that Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003. According to Porter, Israeli elements responsible for following the Iranian nuclear program then launched an intelligence and diplomatic campaign to convince the United States that the report was wrong. The effort was accompanied by pressure on the IAEA and leaks to the international press that Iran had continued research into nuclear weapons and nuclear test simulations after 2003.

Shmuel Meir — a research fellow at the Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University and former researcher at the intelligence branch of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the strategic unit of the IDF’s Planning Department — praised Porter profusely. He wrote in his May 7 blog, “Porter is perhaps the only journalist and investigator in the world who read, with an unbiased eye, all the IAEA reports and the American intelligence reports of the last several decades regarding the Iranian issue. Likewise, he interviewed several generations of officials in the American administration (including in intelligence) who worked on the Iranian nuclear program, and carefully analyzed testimony they gave in Congress.”