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US sees Israel as main spy threat
Dear Reader, why d'you suppose the CIA leaked this just now?
[Hurriyet Daily News] The CIA station chief opened the locked box containing the sensitive equipment he used from his home in Tel Aviv, Israel, to communicate with CIA headquarters in Virginia, only to find that someone had tampered with it. He sent word to his superiors about the break-in.

The incident, described by three former senior U.S. intelligence officials, might have been dismissed as just another cloak-and-dagger incident in the world of international espionage, except that the same thing had happened to the previous station chief in Israel.

This means the CIA believes that U.S. national secrets are safer from other Middle Eastern governments than from Israel.
It was a not-so-subtle reminder that, even in a country friendly to the United States, the CIA was itself being watched. In all the cases, the U.S. government believes Israel's security services were responsible.

Such meddling underscores what is widely known but rarely discussed outside intelligence circles: Despite inarguable ties between the U.S. and its closest ally in the Middle East and despite statements from U.S. politicians trumpeting the friendship, U.S. national security officials consider Israel to be, at times, a frustrating ally and a genuine counterintelligence threat.

In addition to what the former U.S. officials described as intrusions in homes in the past decade, Israel has been implicated in U.S. criminal espionage cases and disciplinary proceedings against CIA officers and blamed in the presumed death of an important spy in Syria for the CIA during the administration of President George W. Bush.

The CIA considers Israel its No. 1 counterintelligence threat in the agency's Near East Division, the group that oversees spying across the Middle East, according to current and former officials. Counterintelligence is the art of protecting national secrets from spies. This means the CIA believes that U.S. national secrets are safer from other Middle Eastern governments than from Israel.
But the Times of Israel quotes Prime Minister Netanyahu as saying flatly the Ay Pee's report is false:
The Prime Minister’s Office on Saturday denied the content of an Associated Press article suggesting Israeli agents spy on their American colleagues stationed in Israel and constitute a counterintelligence threat to US interests.

In an unusually brief SMS message to Israeli journalists, the media advisers of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wrote: “In response to the report about the CIA, the Prime Minister’s Office states that this a false report.”
Posted by: trailing wife 2012-07-29
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=349269