The news last week that there was a leak of highly classified US intelligence documents
concerning Israel’s plans to retaliate against Iran is the stuff for spy thrillers, but a perusal of the various media accounts leaves several questions unanswered.
1) The documents were posted on Telegram by an account of the pro-Iranian “Middle East Spectator.” What exactly is the relationship between the Spectator and the Iranian regime?
2) How did the Spectator receive the documents? Was it a leak from a US intelligence source as claimed or via hack?
3) The Spectator reported two documents that were leaked, were there more?
Most of the reporting has focused on the damage done to Israel’s retaliatory plans, but there are multiple angles here, games within games. If the Middle East Spectator has links to the Iranian regime, which would seem likely, why did it publish the documents? If the goal was to deter an Israeli attack than that could have been accomplished through back-channels without providing leads, and possible compromise, to its origins.
It is not clear how much information was leaked to the Spectator and thereby to the Iranian regime. It is quite likely that there are more than two documents or to put it a different way, there is no reason to believe that there were only two.
Most importantly, and perhaps an answer to an earlier point, maybe the real reason for the leak was not so much to deter (which could have been accomplished in other ways), but to communicate to Israel that it could not rely on the Biden Administration or indeed the American security apparatus in general. The Biden Administration revived the Obama era’s playing footsies with Tehran and there are allegations that it has tolerated Iranian intelligence operations in American government. That Iranian tilt is matched by anti-Isareli animus in the State Department and elsewhere in DC.
There smells like a Iranian intelligence operation conducted with semi-rogue American partners, not to just deter an Israeli attack, but to further nurture Israeli doubts about the reliability of the Biden Administration and the American security bureaucracy in general conveying to Jerusalem its growing isolation from its main ally.