US 'spied on Binyamin Netanyahu during Iran nuclear deal talks'

The US spied on the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, because of concerns he would derail the Iran nuclear deal, according to a new account of surveillance operations.

Despite Barack Obama’s promise to curtail eavesdropping on allies in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations about the scale and scope of US activities, the National Security Agency’s (NSA) surveillance included phone conversations between top Israeli officials, US congressmen and American-Jewish groups, according to the Wall Street Journal.
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The White House did not confirm or deny the report. Ned Price, spokesman for the National Security Council, said on Wednesday: “We are not going to comment on any specific alleged intelligence activities. As a general matter, and as we have said previously, we do not conduct any foreign intelligence surveillance activities unless there is a specific and validated national security purpose. This applies to ordinary citizens and world leaders alike.”

Relations between Obama and Netanyahu have often been described as strained. The NSA reports allowed Obama administration officials to peer inside Israeli efforts to turn Congress against the Iran deal, the Wall Street Journal said.

The surveillance allegedly revealed how Netanyahu and his advisers had leaked details of the US-Iran negotiations, which they learned through Israeli spying operations. Last March, Israel denied reports that its security forces spied on the negotiations between Tehran and major powers over Iran’s nuclear capacities.

Israel’s ambassador to the US, Ron Dermer, was described as coaching unnamed Jewish-American groups on lines of argument to use on Capitol Hill, and Israeli officials were pressuring legislators to oppose the deal, the newspaper said.

The revelations came despite Obama’s promise two years ago to curb spying on US allies following intelligence contractor Edward Snowden’s exposure of the vast extent of the NSA’s online surveillance.

Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel had been embarrassed by the revelation that her mobile phone had been monitored and other allies expressed private concerns about the breadth of NSA monitoring.

But, according to the Wall Street Journal, Obama decided there was a “compelling national security purpose” in continuing to monitor some leaders, including Netanyahu and Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

The US administration decided not to remove or disable the “cyber-implants” it had embedded in foreign communications systems, as they would be hard to replace. Instead, the report said, Obama ordered that some of the hacked systems used by close allies would not be routinely monitored by the NSA, while others would continue to be mined for intelligence.
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“Going dark on Bibi? Of course we wouldn’t do that,” one unnamed senior US official told the paper, which claimed that one tool was a cyber implant in Israeli networks that gave the NSA access to communications within the Israel prime minister’s office.

In addition, after Israel’s lobbying campaign against the Iran nuclear deal went into full swing on Capitol Hill, administration and intelligence officials realised that the NSA was sweeping up the content of conversations with members of Congress, the newspaper said. One unnamed US official described that realisation as “an ‘oh shit’ moment”.

A 2011 NSA directive said direct communications between foreign intelligence targets and members of Congress should be destroyed when they are intercepted. But the NSA director can issue a waiver if he determines the communications contain “significant foreign intelligence”, the Journal said.

During Israel’s lobbying campaign in the months before the deal was passed by Congress in September, the NSA removed the names of legislators from intelligence reports and weeded out personal information, the newspaper said.

Price of the National Security Council said on Wednesday: “When it comes to Israel, President Obama has said repeatedly that the US commitment to Israel’s security is sacrosanct. This message has always been backed by concrete actions that demonstrate the depth of US support for Israel.”

He added: “Our support for Israel was an important element in deterring Iran from ever seeking a nuclear weapon, and remains a critical part of our efforts to push back against Iran’s destabilising actions in the region.”

John Kirby, spokesman for the State Department, told MSNBC’s Morning Joe: “Without getting into intelligence matters, the president made it clear that we’re not going to collect intelligence on national leaders unless there’s some strong compelling national security case. So I’m not going to talk about the specifics in that article. I’m just not going to address the intelligence aspects here.”

He added: “The secretary [of state] enjoys a very strong relationship with Prime Minister Netanyahu and they speak frequently. We don’t always agree, of course, with Israeli leaders about everything that’s going on there or in the region, but he has a very, very healthy relationship with the prime minister and works at that relationship very hard.”

But Marco Rubio, a member of the Senate intelligence committee and Republican presidential candidate, told Fox News: “Obviously people read this report, they have a right to be concerned this morning about it. They have a right to be concerned about the fact that while some leaders around the world are no longer being targeted, one of our strongest allies in the Middle East – Israel – is.”

He continued: “I actually think it might be worse than what some people might think, but this is an issue that we’ll keep a close eye on, and the role that I have in the intelligence committee. But I’m not trying to be evasive, but I want to be very careful in a national broadcast like this how we discuss these sorts of issues.”

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/30/us-spying-netanyahu-israel-iran-nuclear-deal-obama-nsa