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Israel’s N.S.A. Scandal

In Moscow this summer, while reporting a story for Wired magazine, I had the rare opportunity to hang out for three days with Edward J. Snowden. It gave me a chance to get a deeper understanding of who he is and why, as a National Security Agency contractor, he took the momentous step of leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents.

Among his most shocking discoveries, he told me, was the fact that the N.S.A. was routinely passing along the private communications of Americans to a large and very secretive Israeli military organization known as Unit 8200. This transfer of intercepts, he said, included the contents of the communications as well as metadata such as who was calling whom.…  Seguir leyendo »

Ten years ago today, a man emerged from prison to be greeted by a crowd of his supporters embracing him with carnations and a crowd of his enemies drawing their fingers across their throats. He had served 18 years in prison, 11 of them in solitary confinement.

The man was Mordechai Vanunu, the whistleblower who, in 1986, came to Britain to tell the Sunday Times the story of the then secret nuclear weapons facility at Dimona in Israel. Out alone in London and disillusioned with the length of time the story seemed to be taking to reach publication, he was lured by a woman from Mossad to Italy.…  Seguir leyendo »

In January 2007, Israeli intelligence officials were horrified by information acquired when Mossad agents broke into the hotel room of a senior Syrian official in London and downloaded the contents of his laptop. The pilfered files revealed that Syria, aided by North Korea, was building a nuclear reactor that could produce an atomic bomb.

Until then, according to military intelligence officials, Israeli intelligence thought Syria had no nuclear program. But that was because Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, had set up a parallel and separate system of command and control for building the reactor. The discovery caused a panic in Israel, and grave concern in Washington, which had relied heavily on Israel’s assurances that it knew everything about Syria.…  Seguir leyendo »

Hay un aspecto del presunto asesinato del jefe de Hamás en Dubai por parte de agentes israelíes que quienes participaron en la operación parecen haber ignorado. Los agentes se disfrazaron de tenistas porque la principal tenista femenina de Israel, Shahar Harel, había sido invitada por Dubai a jugar en un torneo internacional que se celebraba allí. Esta increíble insolencia sobrepasa cuestiones como el uso ilegal de pasaportes extranjeros y el abuso de la hospitalidad de Dubai, un Estado árabe que tiene mucho que perder por el mero hecho de mantener una relación de facto con el Estado judío.

Los asesinos, en cierto modo, formaban parte de la delegación oficial de tenis de Israel.…  Seguir leyendo »

El 20 de enero del 2010 se cometió  un asesinato a plena luz del día en una habitación de un hotel en Dubái. Las cámaras lo grabaron todo. Todo: los preparativos, los disfraces, la técnica, los rostros y las máscaras, las pelucas y los accesorios deportivos. Todo. La videovigilancia no distingue entre ladrones y violadores, entre la simple agresión de un gamberro y la acción premeditada de un comando de asesinos enviado por un Estado para eliminar a su adversario, al enemigo. Todos o casi todos los estados han hecho algo así durante la guerra fría. Pero lo que ha hecho el Mosad, el servicio secreto israelí, es un asesinato clásico en el que, generalmente, no se dejan huellas y no se encuentra nunca a los autores del crimen.…  Seguir leyendo »

The assassination of Imad Mugniyah, the Hezbollah terrorist, in Damascus last week was a warning that even the most elusive prey can be hunted down — given skill, determination and patience on the part of the hunter. The blast that dispatched Mr. Mugniyah, a top target for Israeli and American intelligence for most of three decades, was heard loud and clear by Khaled Mashal, the exiled political chief of Palestinian Hamas, who at the time was meeting with Syrian intelligence officers only a few hundred yards away.

In 1997, Mr. Mashal escaped death at the hands of the Mossad, the Israeli spy agency, when a poisoning attempt in Amman, Jordan, went disastrously wrong.…  Seguir leyendo »

By Jim Hoagland (THE WASHINGTON POST, 30/07/06):

Israel has been forced to improvise furiously on the battlefield after discovering how much it did not know about the fighters and the strategic arsenal that Hezbollah had amassed in southern Lebanon. Americans should watch closely what will happen in Israel once the smoke of this battle clears.

What will happen will be a thorough and bureaucratically impartial inquiry into the causes of this intelligence failure -- an inquiry of the kind that the United States seems unable to produce even in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, or the calamitous failure of U.S.…  Seguir leyendo »