Friday, September 20, 2013

The Spies Inside Damascus

"... Israel shared its findings with the United States, but Washington would not acknowledge those findings' veracity. It was clear to the Israelis that the Americans saw those findings as a hot potato that the president was in no mood to hold. Without grasping the deep political significance of publicizing this material (or perhaps doing so intentionally to put pressure on Washington), Brig. Gen. Itai Brun, the head of the Aman, the Israeli military intelligence corps' research division, stated clearly in an April 23 speech at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons on its citizens. 
This utterance angered and embarrassed the U.S. administration. Washington stuttered for a few days and demanded clarifications from Israel. In the end, and following areport submitted to the United Nations by Britain and France, the Obama administration had to admit that the informationwas in fact correct. Since then, to avoid similar commotions, Aman officers are forbidden to appear in public conferences.
Either way, the intelligence coordination between Israel and the United States has not suffered, and Israel continues to (feed)share the vast amounts of information that it has about Syria with the United States. Published reports credit Israel with giving the CIA, as the Wall Street Journal put it, "intelligence from inside an elite special Syrian unit....
"We have a very extensive knowledge of what is happening in Syria. Our ability to collect information there is profound. Israel is the eyes and ears, sometimes exclusively, sometimes as complementary aid, to what the U.S. intelligence is able or unable to collect itself," Maj. Gen. Uri Sagi, Israel's former chief of military intelligence, told me on Sept. 19. .."

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