Keep your friends close…

The Pentagon has raised its counterintelligence threat level for Israel to "critical", the highest designation possible, amid growing concerns that Israeli espionage against the United States has become unusually aggressive. According to reporting by NBC News and The New York Times, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) recently issued a seven-page assessment warning that Israel is actively surveilling senior American officials to gain insight into the Trump administration's internal deliberations on Middle East policy. The move comes as relations have grown increasingly strained over the Iran war and diverging regional objectives. Israel has denied the allegations outright.

A pattern, not an anomaly: The historical record of Israeli espionage

The most infamous of epsionage cases remains that of Jonathan Jay Pollard, a U.S. Navy intelligence analyst whose arrest in 1985 became the defining scandal of American-Israeli espionage relations and forced Washington to confront an uncomfortable truth about its closest Middle Eastern ally. In a June 1986 piece titled "Darker Side of U.S.-Israeli Ties Revealed," New York Times correspondent Bernard Weinraub argued that U.S.-Israeli intelligence relations have long carried a troubling undercurrent beneath the surface of close cooperation. Writing shortly after Pollard's guilty plea, Weinraub reveals that while the two nations routinely share vast amounts of intelligence, their interests inevitably diverge, and when they do, spying follows.

Yet as Charles R. Babcock reported in the Washington Post that same month, the most striking aspect of Israeli intelligence collection was not the presence of paid moles, but rather a vast informal network of sympathetic American officials spanning the Pentagon, the State Department, congressional offices, the National Security Council, and even U.S. intelligence agencies themselves. According to a secret 1979 CIA report cited by Babcock, Israel had been able to learn virtually every secret about U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East for decades, harvested not through classic espionage tradecraft, but through officials who simply felt a personal or ideological affinity with the Israeli cause and saw little harm in sharing what they knew.

Babcock notes that the FBI had been running wiretaps on the Israeli Embassy since at least the early 1970s and had opened dozens of files on alleged Israeli espionage activity, yet no one was prosecuted before Pollard. A senior Reagan administration official frankly acknowledged that the disclosure of classified material to Israel had become so routine it was an open secret in Washington. The Israelis also pursued U.S. science and technology through covert means when official channels were unavailable.

The espionage record stretches back further still. In the 1960s, around 200 pounds of weapons-grade uranium vanished from a processing facility in Apollo, Pennsylvania, triggering top-secret FBI and Atomic Energy Commission investigations. Although no charges were ever filed, the CIA concluded the material had most likely been diverted toward Israel's nascent nuclear weapons program.

As detailed by Olivia De Rita in Grey Dynamics, Pollard, acknowledged as an Israeli operative by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself in May 1998, conducted his espionage between June 1984 and November 1985. He was initially recruited to pass military intelligence to Israeli handler Yosef Yagur, focusing on Arab countries' military developments. Over time, the material expanded significantly, encompassing Arab and Pakistani nuclear technology, chemical and biological weapons programs, Soviet aircraft and air defense systems, and intelligence on Arab nations' relationships with the Soviet Union. Perhaps most sensitive of all, Pollard also passed information identifying Israeli political figures who were themselves providing intelligence to the CIA, effectively blowing the cover of U.S. assets inside Israel.

Pollard was not the only American passing secrets to Yagur. De Rita also notes that former U.S. Army mechanical engineer Ben-Ami Kadish was arrested in 2008 for transferring classified documents to the same Israeli handler between 1980 and 1985, overlapping directly with Pollard's own operation. Among the materials Kadish compromised was sensitive information on U.S. missile defense systems, underscoring that Israeli intelligence was running parallel networks inside the American defense establishment simultaneously.

The pattern continued into the following decade. In 2004, the FBI launched an investigation into Lawrence Franklin, a civilian Pentagon desk officer specializing in Iran policy, over allegations that he had passed classified U.S. policy information to two former American Israel Public Affairs Committee employees, Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman. The information was then allegedly forwarded to Israeli embassy officials in Washington. By 2005, all three men had been indicted, though ultimately only Franklin served prison time, an outcome De Rita highlights as emblematic of the broader difficulty in prosecuting espionage cases linked to Israel.

Weinraub notes that U.S. and Israeli intelligence organizations had quietly maintained a discreet arrangement since the 1950s, effectively agreeing not to spy on one another. These successive cases shattered that understanding. What made them collectively alarming was not just the classified material compromised, but the systemic nature of the problem, one that senior U.S. officials had long recognized, quietly tolerated, and rarely punished.

The present moment

The DIA's decision to raise Israel's counterintelligence threat level to "critical" in 2026 is striking, but it is not without precedent. What the declassified record makes plain is that Israeli espionage against the United States is neither new nor aberrational, it is a recurring feature of a relationship defined as much by diverging interests as by shared ones. From the uranium disappearance of the 1960s to the Pollard network of the 1980s, through the Franklin-AIPAC affair of the 2000s and now to the current DIA assessment, the pattern is consistent: when objectives diverge, Israel resorts to intelligence collection. The question facing the Trump administration today is not simply how to respond to a specific threat, but whether decades of quiet tolerance have made the problem structurally impossible to confront.