September 06-13
Newly-leaked documents from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden shows that Washington is spending much effort looking for spies in the United States from Iran—and Israel.
It has long been an open secret that Washington doesn’t entirely trust Israel and that Israel doesn’t entirely trust Washington. But that doesn’t fit in with Iran’s view that the two countries operate hand-in-glove in pushing a unified attack on the Muslim world. So, when Iran reported on the leaked US documents, it did not mention Israel.
The weekly, The Hill, which covers Congress, reported on the leaked document first.
The document was concerned with counter-intelligence—that is, ferreting out spies from other counties operating in the United States and cyber efforts by other countries to penetrate computers in the US intelligence community.
“To further safeguard our classified networks, we continue to strengthen threat detection capabilities across the [intelligence] community,” the document said. “In addition, we are investing to target surveillance and offensive CI [counter intelligence] against key targets, such as China, Russia, Iran, Israel, Pakistan and Cuba.”
A Fars news agency report on the story neglected to mention Israel in its list of the countries whose spies the United States was chiefly concerned about.
Another leaked document said the US conducted 231 offensive cyber operations against other counties in 2011. However, the document did not say how many of those were spying operations seeking out information hidden by other countries and how many were disabling operations, like the Stuxnet attack on the Natanz centrifuges.
