The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency has raised its counterintelligence threat designation for Israel to “critical” — the highest level in its classification system — after concluding that Israeli intelligence operations against American officials have moved beyond what the Pentagon considers normal allied espionage into something more aggressive and more targeted, ATN, New York reported Saturday, citing current and former U.S. officials.
The primary target, according to The New York Times, is Steve Witkoff.
Witkoff is Donald Trump’s special envoy and the administration’s most consequential diplomatic operator — the man who has led U.S. negotiating teams in the Iran talks, the Israel-Hamas negotiations, and the Russia-Ukraine diplomatic track simultaneously.
That Israel would allegedly be running intelligence collection against the one American official most deeply embedded in negotiations that directly affect Israeli national security calculus is, in the blunt assessment of one senior U.S. official quoted by the Times, “unhinged.”
The Pentagon declined to comment. The White House called the story false. Israel’s embassy in Washington said the reporting was either misinformed or politically motivated and denied that Israel gathers intelligence on American officials or entities in any form.
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The internal DIA assessment, officials told NBC, runs to seven pages and documents a series of specific incidents that collectively drove the threat-level upgrade. No single incident was identified as the trigger. What officials described instead was a pattern — Israeli intelligence-gathering that had escalated in frequency and scope since Trump took office last year to a point where the cumulative picture warranted formal reclassification. U.S. officials said Israel is also believed to be targeting Elbridge Colby, the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, and at least one of his deputies, Michael P. DiMino IV.
The assessment does not appear to have disrupted the operational intelligence relationship between the two countries.
Daily intelligence-sharing between Washington and Jerusalem, much of it directly connected to the ongoing Iran war, has continued without interruption, officials said. The most likely immediate consequence of the upgraded designation is procedural: tighter precautions for U.S. officials traveling to Israel or meeting Israeli counterparts in third countries. One current official noted that Washington already applies elevated security protocols to Israel interactions — a tacit acknowledgment, buried in a dependent clause, that concerns about Israeli collection against American targets predate the current escalation.
The Pollard precedent hangs over all of it.
In 1985, Jonathan Pollard — a U.S. Navy intelligence analyst — was arrested for passing classified material to Israeli Mossad handlers. He pleaded guilty, served 30 years in federal prison, and was released in 2015. The case remains the defining trauma in the counterintelligence dimension of the U.S.-Israel relationship, and in its aftermath Israel made a standing commitment to refrain from intelligence operations on American soil. The current assessment, if accurate, would represent a violation of that commitment in spirit if not in letter — with operations apparently directed at U.S. officials operating outside Israel’s borders.
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The timing of the threat-level reclassification tracks with a period of unusually open friction between Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the direction of the war with Iran and Israel’s military campaign in Lebanon. Netanyahu has reportedly lobbied for renewed strikes on Iran at the same time Trump’s team is pursuing a negotiated off-ramp from the conflict. Israel has simultaneously resisted U.S. pressure to scale back Lebanese operations, a posture that has infuriated the administration and contributed to conditions that drove Iran to link any ceasefire progress to Israeli behavior in Lebanon.
The temperature of the relationship became public in terms that left little room for diplomatic interpretation this week, when Trump confirmed he called Netanyahu “fucking crazy” during a phone call about the Lebanon campaign. An account cited by Axios conveyed Trump’s message in fuller terms: that Netanyahu would be in prison without American protection, that the world had turned against Israel because of its conduct, and that Trump himself was expending political capital to defend an ally whose decisions he found indefensible. Trump subsequently said he respected Netanyahu and that the two worked well together.
Against that backdrop — a special envoy allegedly under Israeli surveillance, a defense policy chief reportedly being monitored, a seven-page threat assessment at the highest classification, and a phone call in which the president of the United States told the Israeli prime minister he was crazy — the Israeli embassy’s flat denial that Israel “does not gather intelligence on American entities, let alone US government officials” will be tested not by what either government says publicly but by what the DIA’s document actually contains.
That document has not been released. The classification level assigned to Israel has.
For an alliance that has survived the Pollard scandal, decades of disagreements over settlements and Palestinian statehood, and now a war that has placed American and Israeli strategic priorities in open tension, a “critical” counterintelligence designation is not a rupture. It is something more uncomfortable — a formal acknowledgment, filed in an internal Pentagon message, that Washington no longer fully trusts the ally it is fighting alongside.