[Dr. Aaron Lerner - IMRA: Note the word "generally":

CIA policy generally forbids its officers in Tel Aviv from recruiting
Israeli government sources, officials said. To do so would require approval
from senior CIA leaders, two former senior officials said. During the Bush
administration, the approval had to come from the White House.]

US sees Israel, tight Mideast ally, as spy threat
ADAM GOLDMAN and MATT APUZZO Huffington Post July 28, 2012 08:44 PM EST
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20120728/us-us-israel-spying/

WASHINGTON — 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.

It was a not-so-subtle reminder that, even in a country friendly to the
United States, the CIA was itself being watched.

In a separate episode, according to another two former U.S. officials, a CIA
officer in Israel came home to find the food in the refrigerator had been
rearranged. 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.

Israel employs highly sophisticated, professional spy services that rival
American agencies in technical capability and recruiting human sources.
Unlike Iran or Syria, for example, Israel as a steadfast U.S. ally enjoys
access to the highest levels of the U.S. government in military and
intelligence circles.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't
authorized to talk publicly about the sensitive intelligence and diplomatic
issues between the two countries.

The counterintelligence worries continue even as the U.S. relationship with
Israel features close cooperation on intelligence programs that reportedly
included the Stuxnet computer virus that attacked computers in Iran's main
nuclear enrichment facilities. While the alliance is central to the U.S.
approach in the Middle East, there is room for intense disagreement,
especially in the diplomatic turmoil over Iran's nuclear ambitions.

"It's a complicated relationship," said Joseph Wippl, a former senior CIA
clandestine officer and head of the agency's office of congressional
affairs. "They have their interests. We have our interests. For the U.S.,
it's a balancing act."

The way Washington characterizes its relationship with Israel is also
important to the way the U.S. is regarded by the rest of the world,
particularly Muslim countries.

U.S. political praise has reached a crescendo ahead of Republican
presidential candidate Mitt Romney's scheduled meeting Sunday with Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem. Their relationship spans
decades, since their brief overlap in the 1970s at the Boston Consulting
Group. Both worked as advisers for the firm early in their careers before
Romney co-founded his own private-equity firm. Romney said in a speech this
past week that Israel was "one of our fondest friends," and he criticized
Obama for what he called the administration's "shabby treatment" of the
Jewish state.

"The people of Israel deserve better than what they've received from the
leader of the free world," Romney said in a plain appeal to U.S. Jewish and
pro-Israel evangelical voters.

Obama, who last year was overheard appearing to endorse criticism of
Netanyahu from then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy, has defended his work
with Israel. "We've gotten a lot of business done with Israel over the last
three years," Obama said this year. "I think the prime minister – and
certainly the defense minister – would acknowledge that we've never had
closer military and intelligence cooperation."

An Israeli spokesman in Washington, Lior Weintraub, said his country has
close ties with the U.S. A text message Saturday from the office of Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the report "false."

"Israel's intelligence and security agencies maintain close, broad and
continuous cooperation with their U.S. counterparts," Weintraub said. "They
are our partners in confronting many mutual challenges. Any suggestion
otherwise is baseless and contrary to the spirit and practice of the
security cooperation between our two countries."

The CIA declined comment.

The tension exists on both sides.

The National Security Agency historically has kept tabs on Israel. The U.S.,
for instance, does not want to be caught off guard if Israel launches a
surprise attack that could plunge the region into war and jeopardize oil
supplies, putting American soldiers at risk.

Matthew Aid, the author of "The Secret Sentry," about the NSA, said the U.S.
started spying on Israel even before the state was created in 1948. Aid said
the U.S. had a station on Cyprus dedicated to spying on Israel until 1974.
Today, teams of Hebrew linguists are stationed at Fort Meade, Md., at the
NSA, listening to intercepts of Israeli communications, he said.

CIA policy generally forbids its officers in Tel Aviv from recruiting
Israeli government sources, officials said. To do so would require approval
from senior CIA leaders, two former senior officials said. During the Bush
administration, the approval had to come from the White House.

Israel is not America's closest ally, at least when it comes to whom
Washington trusts with the most sensitive national security information.
That distinction belongs to a group of nations known informally as the "Five
Eyes." Under that umbrella, the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada
and New Zealand agree to share intelligence and not to spy on one another.
Often, U.S. intelligence officers work directly alongside counterparts from
these countries to handle highly classified information not shared with
anyone else.

Israel is part of a second-tier relationship known by another informal name,
"Friends on Friends." It comes from the phrase "Friends don't spy on
friends," and the arrangement dates back decades. But Israel's foreign
intelligence service, the Mossad, and its FBI equivalent, the Shin Bet, both
considered among the best in the world, have been suspected of recruiting
U.S. officials and trying to steal American secrets.

Around 2004 or 2005, the CIA fired two female officers for having unreported
contact with Israelis. One of the women acknowledged during a polygraph exam
that she had been in a relationship with an Israeli who worked in the
Foreign Ministry, a former U.S. official said. The CIA learned the Israeli
introduced the woman to his "uncle." That person worked for Shin Bet.

Jonathan Pollard, who worked for the Navy as a civilian intelligence
analyst, was convicted of spying for Israel in 1987 when the Friends on
Friends agreement was in effect. He was sentenced to life in prison. The
Israelis for years have tried to win his release. In January 2011, Netanyahu
asked Obama to free Pollard and acknowledged that Israel's actions in the
case were "wrong and wholly unacceptable."

Ronald Olive, a former senior supervisor with the Naval Criminal
Investigative Service who investigated Pollard, said that after the arrest,
the U.S. formed a task force to determine what government records Pollard
had taken. Olive said Israel turned over so few that it represented "a speck
in the sand."

In the wake of Pollard, the Israelis promised not to operate intelligence
agents on U.S. soil.

A former Army mechanical engineer, Ben-Ami Kadish, pleaded guilty in 2008 to
passing classified secrets to the Israelis during the 1980s. His case
officer was the same one who handled Pollard. Kadish let the Israelis
photograph documents about nuclear weapons, a modified version of an F-15
fighter jet and the U.S. Patriot missile air defense system. Kadish, who was
85 years old when he was arrested, avoided prison and was ordered to pay a
$50,000 fine. He told the judge that, "I thought I was helping the state of
Israel without harming the United States."

In 2006, a former Defense Department analyst was sentenced to more than 12
years in prison for giving classified information to an Israeli diplomat and
two pro-Israel lobbyists.

Despite the Pollard case and others, Olive said he believes the two
countries need to maintain close ties "but do we still have to be vigilant?
Absolutely. The Israelis are good at what they do."

During the Bush administration, the CIA ranked some of the world's
intelligence agencies in order of their willingness to help in the U.S.-led
fight against terrorism. One former U.S. intelligence official who saw the
completed list said Israel, which hadn't been directly targeted in attacks
by al-Qaida, fell below Libya, which recently had agreed to abandon its
nuclear weapons program.

The espionage incidents have done little to slow the billions of dollars in
money and weapons from the United States to Israel. Since Pollard's arrest,
Israel has received more than $60 billion in U.S. aid, mostly in the form of
military assistance, according to the Congressional Research Service. The
U.S. has supplied Israel with Patriot missiles, helped pay for an
anti-missile defense program and provided sensitive radar equipment to track
Iranian missile threats.

Just on Friday, Obama said he was releasing an additional $70 million in
military aid, a previously announced move that appeared timed to upstage
Romney's trip, and he spoke of America's "unshakable commitment to Israel."
The money will go to help Israel expand production of a short-range rocket
defense system.

Some CIA officials still bristle over the disappearance of a Syrian
scientist who during the Bush administration was the CIA's only spy inside
Syria's military program to develop chemical and biological weapons. The
scientist was providing the agency with extraordinary information about
pathogens used in the program, former U.S. officials said about the
previously unknown intelligence operation.

At the time, there was pressure to share information about weapons of mass
destruction, and the CIA provided its intelligence to Israel. A former
official with direct knowledge of the case said details about Syria's
program were published in the media. Although the CIA never formally
concluded that Israel was responsible, CIA officials complained to Israel
about their belief that Israelis were leaking the information to pressure
Syria to abandon the program. The Syrians pieced together who had access to
the sensitive information and eventually identified the scientist as a
traitor.

Before he disappeared and was presumed killed, the scientist told his CIA
handler that Syrian Military Intelligence was focusing on him.

___

Contact the Washington investigative team at dcinvestigations(at)ap.org