Israel Rejects ‘Baseless’ Accusations of Spying on U.S.
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
Senior Israeli officials continue to assert that Israel does not spy on the United States, in the wake of a second Newsweek magazine article accusing Israel of “aggressive spying” against the U.S.
Strategic and Intelligence Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz told Israel’s Channel 10 over the weekend that someone is trying to ruin the cooperation between Israel and the United States by providing such information.
The article appeared on Thursday.
Former Military Intelligence chief Amos Yadlin on Saturday night called the accusations “absolutely baseless,” telling Channel 2 that “Israel is unequivocally not spying in the U.S.”
The Newsweek article asserted that while then-U.E. Vice President Al Gore was on a visit to Israel in 1998, an Israeli spy hid in the air duct in his hotel bathroom. The article asserts that such incidents are not widely known about because the aggressor in this case is Israel.
An unnamed U.S. official quoted in the article rejected the assertion that the espionage accusations “had the whiff of anti-Semitism in it.”
The official said: “It has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. It has only to do with why [Israel] gets kid-glove treatment when, if it was Japan doing it or India doing it at this level, it would be outrageous.”
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