Israeli Intel Officials ‘Boiling Mad’ at Trump for Sharing Intel With Russia

Say Trump Endangered Israeli Spy Placed in ISIS

President Trump’s revelation of classified information to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov last week has Israel “boiling mad,” after other US officials confirmed that the intelligence originally came from an Israeli spy placed within the ISIS movement.

Israeli intelligence officials say this amounts to their “worst fears confirmed,” that the US, with whom they have an exclusive intelligence-sharing deal, are passing that information along without Israel’s prior knowledge. There has been some concern that the revelation could put the Israeli spy at risk, since Russia was told what city he was in.

Of course a lot of the speculation about actual danger being posed to the spy is based on speculation that Russia would want to out the spy as a way of ensuring he doesn’t hypothetically start spying on Syria’s government in the future. Whether this is true or not is unclear, particularly if he is proving valuable on intelligence against ISIS, who is a problem for Russia as much as the US.

Early after the election, Israeli intelligence officials were being warned specifically against sharing as much intelligence with Trump as they had with past US administrations, claiming that the intelligence might be passed on to Russia.  That it indeed happened in this case is likely to raise a lot more eyebrows with respect to the Israel-Trump relationship.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.