Leaked Documents and Games Within Games

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 then 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 practice of 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-Israel animus in the State Department and elsewhere in DC.

This smells like an Iranian intelligence operation conducted with semi-rogue American partners, not just to deter an Israeli attack, but to further nurture Israeli doubts about the reliability of the Biden administration and of the American security bureaucracy in general — conveying to Jerusalem its growing isolation from its main ally.

4 thoughts on “Leaked Documents and Games Within Games”

  1. A slight quibble but an important one. They didn’t share actual documents but reported conclusions from one document and the supposed source agency. Assuming we still have an even minimally functional intelligence apparatus, slightly different versions of these conclusions would have been distributed through different channels to assist in tracing such a leak. Those variations could have included the exact number of weapons or the dates which are immaterial to the conclusion but, as here, likely to make it into a media report. People just can’t resist showing just how much they know, even when it would have been much more prudent to report generalities. Even this organization knew enough not to display the entire document, again, assuming they actually have one.

    As you say, games within games.

  2. My first thought upon seeing the phrase “games within games” is that this might be actual, real disinformation from Israel, intended to confirm their suspicions about American Intelligence. Create a viable plan for retaliation against Iran (although not the real plan) and then see where the information flows. Then Israel knows how to maintain operational security for the real plan against Iran.

    I mean, these are the guys who perpetrated the exploding pagers and walkie talkies. They’re not amateurs, and they know Biden’s public statements about Israel aren’t his true feelings. They also know by this point Biden’s not in charge.

  3. The first question a junior intelligence analyst needs to answer is just what of that “release” is true. NGIA presumably knows if they ever originated such a document and who it was distributed to. With a Congressional investigation getting underway, we undesirables may even find out in time but I’m not going to hold my breath. There are a lot of satellites that belong to a lot of different parties and there’s no guaranty that it even came from a satellite. There’s no real guaranty that the whole thing isn’t just made up, possibly based on some sort of rumor. I can certainly think of any number of parties that would drive any wedge they could between the U.S. and Israel.

    The Israelis were seen “handling” these weapons which means what, exactly? Arming the strike aircraft would have been done hours, at most, before launch, not days. Especially, as you may have heard, while the IAF has a few other things going on. Drill? Dress rehearsal? One thing I’m reasonably sure of is that Israel knows just which satellites can see what at any given time. Maybe they assumed that they didn’t need to hide from an American satellite.

    Yet another instance of those who say, don’t know and those who know won’t say.

  4. There is the possibility of it being a disinformation campaign, thus the “games within games.”

    Yes there are only two documents and they are summaries. If the document was leaked from within the US, then it would be probably be a step too far to reveal means and methods. Or Iran is just bluffing

    The problem is that either way, there is a problem in US-Israel relations where not only is the Biden Administration hedging its bets, but that there are actors within the executive branch, at the level of permanent government employees, who are not happy with US policy toward Israel and would like to undermine it.

    The Biden Administration has tolerated this because it lacks the ability to enforce neutrality among the bureaucracy; witness the protests by bureaucrats toward Gaza. Even if Biden or Blinken assured that the leak didn’t come from the US, could they be believed given the existence of free lancers?

    Or it could just be an Iranian info op,

    We are looking at tea leaves here. Checking the NY Times and Washington Post, which thrive on administration leaks, it seems nobody is denying the documents (such as they are) are false.

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