NSA Threat Assessments on Israel

Summary

The U.S. intelligence community’s own classified files rank Israel among the most aggressive foreign intelligence threats operating against the United States — categorized in budget and planning documents alongside Russia, China, Iran, and Cuba. “One of NSA’s biggest threats is actually from friendly intelligence services, like Israel,” a senior NSA official stated flatly in a 2008 document. These assessments span multiple agencies and years; they became public between 2013 and 2015 through the Edward Snowden disclosures and reporting by The Guardian, The Intercept, and Newsweek, and they predate those disclosures by at least six years.

Background

The U.S. and Israel maintain an extensive intelligence-sharing relationship, particularly in signals intelligence collection against third-party targets in the Middle East. This cooperative dimension has historically been used by both governments to characterize the bilateral intelligence relationship as one of deep mutual trust. The documents described in this article represent the internal counterintelligence dimension of that relationship — the assessments produced by U.S. agencies specifically tasked with identifying threats to U.S. government information and operations, including threats from allied nations.

These documents were not produced by journalists or outside analysts. They are internal U.S. government assessments, produced by NSA officials and the Director of National Intelligence’s budget process, describing Israel in language otherwise reserved for adversary nations.

What Happened

2008 NSA Internal Interview — “Which Foreign Intelligence Service Is the Biggest Threat to the US?”

One top-secret 2008 document features an interview with the NSA’s Global Capabilities Manager for Countering Foreign Intelligence, in a document entitled “Which Foreign Intelligence Service Is the Biggest Threat to the US?” He repeatedly names Israel as one of the key threats.

In the document, the official states: “On the one hand, the Israelis are extraordinarily good Sigint partners for us, but on the other, they target us to learn our positions on Middle East problems.” He further states that a National Intelligence Estimate ranked Israel as “the third most aggressive intelligence service against the US.”

2007 NSA Strategic Mission List

Israel was singled out in the NSA’s 2007 Strategic Mission List as a top espionage threat against the U.S. government, including its intelligence services. The document also identified Israel, along with North Korea, Cuba and India, as a “leading threat” to the infrastructure of U.S. financial and banking institutions.

In a section of the document headed “Foreign Intelligence, Counterintelligence; Denial and Deception Activities: Countering Foreign Intelligence Threats,” Israel was listed as a leading perpetrator of “espionage/intelligence collection operations and manipulation/influence operations against U.S. government, military, science and technology and Intelligence Community” organs.

2013 Intelligence Community “Black Budget”

The top-secret 2013 intelligence budget, previously referenced by the Washington Post, lists Israel in multiple places as a key intelligence “target” and even a “hostile foreign intelligence service” among several other countries typically thought of as the U.S.'s most entrenched adversaries.

The budget document reveals that counterintelligence operations were “strategically focused against priority targets of China, Russia, Iran, Cuba, and Israel.”

2007 NSA Historical Document — US-Israel SIGINT Relationship

A top-secret 2007 document entitled “History of the US-Israel SIGINT Relationship, post 1992” describes the cooperation as highly productive and valuable, yet complains that the relationship even after 9/11 was almost entirely one-sided in favor of serving Israeli rather than U.S. interests.

NSA Raw Intelligence Sharing Agreement

A separate document, also reported by The Guardian, revealed that the NSA shares raw intelligence with Israel before going through it to remove information about Americans. The document states the intelligence shared would not be filtered in advance by NSA analysts to remove U.S. communications, and that there are no legally binding limits on data used by Israel.

Key Figures

Edward Snowden — Former NSA contractor; source of the disclosed documents; currently in Russia under asylum.
Glenn Greenwald — Journalist; The Intercept founding editor; primary reporter for the Israel-related NSA documents.
The Guardian — First outlet to report the raw intelligence sharing agreement and 2008 NSA interview.
NSA Global Capabilities Manager for Countering Foreign Intelligence — Senior NSA official quoted in the 2008 document; name classified.
Benjamin Netanyahu — Israeli Prime Minister at time of 2015 publication; his office issued a categorical denial that Israel conducts espionage against the United States or its allies, directly contradicted by the documents.

Official Response

Netanyahu’s office, responding to a March 2015 Wall Street Journal report that Israel had spied on U.S.-Iran nuclear negotiations and passed intelligence to Congressional Republicans, issued a statement that was categorical and absolute, extending beyond the specific story to U.S.-targeted spying generally, claiming: “The state of Israel does not conduct espionage against the United States or Israel’s other allies.”

That denial is directly contradicted by the top-secret NSA documents, which state that Israel targets the U.S. government for invasive electronic surveillance and does so more aggressively and threateningly than almost any other country in the world.

The NSA, when asked about the raw intelligence sharing agreement, stated it would not comment on specific information-sharing arrangements but confirmed that intelligence services work together “under specific and regulated conditions.”

Consequences

No policy changes resulted from the public disclosure of these assessments. U.S. military aid to Israel continued without interruption. No official U.S. government statement acknowledged or addressed the contradiction between the internal threat assessments and the public characterization of the U.S.-Israel intelligence relationship.

Washington’s protective relationship toward Israel remains heavily influenced by close cooperation in intelligence operations against common Middle Eastern threats.

Significance

The cluster of NSA and intelligence community documents described here is significant not for what it reveals about any single incident, but for what it establishes about the institutional U.S. government assessment of Israeli intelligence activity as a systemic, ongoing concern. The language used — “hostile foreign intelligence service,” “priority threat country,” “third most aggressive intelligence service against the US” — appears in budget documents and strategic planning files, meaning it reflects not individual analysts’ opinions but the operational priorities of U.S. counterintelligence. The documents also surface a specific tension that the U.S. government has never publicly acknowledged: that the same country receiving the largest cumulative total of U.S. foreign aid in American history is simultaneously categorized in internal planning documents alongside Russia, China, Iran, and Cuba as a counterintelligence target requiring active offensive operations.

Sources

NSA, “Which Foreign Intelligence Service Is the Biggest Threat to the US?” (2008 internal document, top secret) — published by The Guardian and The Intercept, 2013–2015
NSA Strategic Mission List, 2007 (top secret) — published by The Intercept via Glenn Greenwald, August 2014
Director of National Intelligence, “Black Budget” FY2013 (top secret) — published by The Washington Post, August 2013; Israel sections reported by The Intercept, March 2015
NSA-ISNU (Israeli SIGINT National Unit) Raw Intelligence Sharing Memorandum (top secret) — published by The Guardian, September 2013
NSA, “History of the US-Israel SIGINT Relationship, post 1992” (top secret, 2007) — published by The Intercept, March 2015
The Intercept, “Netanyahu’s Spying Denials Contradicted by Secret NSA Documents,” Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Fishman, March 25, 2015
Newsweek, “Israel Flagged as Top Spy Threat to U.S. in New Snowden/NSA Document,” February 23, 2015