Sex, Blackmail and Theft: Leaks Detail Israeli Spy Operations

by  Asa Winstanley, via The Electronic Intafada.net: 

Yesterday Al Jazeera began to unveil what the channel is promoting as “the largest intelligence leak since Edward Snowden,” the NSA whistleblower.

The most widely-covered story revealed that only weeks after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s 2012 speech to the UN General Assembly about the dangers of Iran’s supposed nuclear weapons program, Israel’s spy agency Mossad in fact assessed that “Iran at this stage is not performing the activity necessary to produce [nuclear] weapons.”

But the cables also give insights on the lengths to which the Palestinian Authority has gone in its war against Hamas, Palestine’s Islamic resistance movement.

They also reveal new details about the PA’s participation in the US-Israeli campaign against the Goldstone report. South African judge Richard Goldstone headed a team which authored a UN investigation that ultimately accused Israel and Hamas of war crimes during Israel’s brutal 2008-09 assault on the Gaza Strip.

Unlike the Snowden leaks, which focused on signals intelligence, these cables focus on human intelligence. In other words, they read like something out of a more mundane version of a spy novel.

In 2011 the Palestine Papers (which were leaked by sources including former Palestine Liberation Organization negotiator Ziyad Clot) revealed that the PA agreed to go along with US and Israeli demands to delay the formal presentation of the Goldstone report at the United Nations Human Rights Council.

Campaign against Goldstone

A cable from South Africa’s National Intelligence Agency recounts that in 2009, then Mossad chief Meir Dagan called the head of the agency on his personal cell phone.

After the agency verified that Dagan really was who he said he was – the South African spies were apparently flummoxed as to how the Israelis got the number – they agreed to pass on their message to the politicians.

Dagan used the call to lobby against the Goldstone report, which South Africa, as a member of the UN Human Rights Council, had a say in. Dagan claimed that PA leader Mahmoud Abbas was also against the report being endorsed by the UN: “this will play in the hands [sic] of Hamas and weaken his position” the cable reads.

(You can read the full cable on pages 2-4 of the document appended to this unrelated Spy Cables story about an attempt by the British to recruit a North Korean spy.)

Speaking to the press today in response to the cables, PLO official Hanan Ashrawi denied that Abbas engaged Dagan as a lobbyist against Goldstone, Al Jazeera English reported.

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