Scandal Over Leak Of U.S. Intel On Israel’s Attack Preparations Grows
The NYT: “The documents, which offer interpretations of satellite imagery, provide insight into a potential strike by Israel on Iran in the coming days.”
Serious questions loom as the Biden administration and the Pentagon struggle to explain how highly classified U.S. documents ended up in the hands of Iranians.
Earlier this week, top secret U.S. documents on a possible Israeli counter-strike against Iran began appearing on Tehran-affiliated social media channels. The documents show classified U.S. satellite imagery and intelligence assessment on an impending Israeli military retaliation to the October 1 Iranian missile strike.
The document, belonging to “National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which is responsible for analyzing images and information collected by American spy satellites,” contained details of Israeli “military drills and weapons placement” in the run-up to a possible counter-strike against Iran,” The New York Times reported Saturday.
“The documents, which offer interpretations of satellite imagery, provide insight into a potential strike by Israel on Iran in the coming days,” the NYT added.
The leaked documents “are marked top secret and have markings indicating they are meant to be seen only by the US and its “Five Eyes” allies — Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom,” CNN reported Sunday. “They describe preparations Israel appears to be making for a strike against Iran.
The Associated Press on Sunday reported details of the intel leak:
The United States is investigating an unauthorized release of classified documents that assess Israel’s plans to attack Iran, three U.S. officials told The Associated Press. A fourth U.S. official said the documents appear to be legitimate.
The documents are attributed to the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency, and note that Israel was still moving military assets in place to conduct a military strike in response to Iran’s blistering ballistic missile attack on Oct. 1. They were sharable within the “Five Eyes,” which are the U.S., Great Britain, Canada, New Zealand and Australia.
The documents, which are marked top secret, were posted to the Telegram messaging app and first reported by CNN and Axios. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
The investigation is also examining how the documents were obtained — including whether it was an intentional leak by a member of the U.S. intelligence community or obtained by another method, like a hack — and whether any other intelligence information was compromised, one of the officials said. As part of that investigation, officials are working to determine who had access to the documents before they were posted, the official said. (…)
In a statement, the Pentagon said it was aware of the reports of the documents but did not have further comment.
The documents, leaked to an Iranian-affiliated Telegram channel, were allegedly provided by a ‘source’ within the U.S. national security apparatus. “The leak occurred on Friday when the Middle East Spectator Telegram channel claimed it had received documents about Israel’s strike preparations from a source within the US intelligence community. This Telegram channel is known for publishing pro-Iranian propaganda, and its associated Twitter account states that its operators are based in Iran,” the Jerusalem Post reported Sunday.
The intelligence breach comes as the Biden-Harris administration is pressuring Israel to limit the scope of the Israeli counter-strike against Iran. “Washington has sought to temper Jerusalem’s plans to retaliate for the October 1 attack — which forced most of the country to rush to bomb shelters and safe rooms and killed a Palestinian man in the West Bank — fearing that the escalating tit-for-tats could spark a wider war, drawing in others in the region,” The Times of Israel noted Sunday. “It has urged Israel not to strike Iran’s nuclear or oil facilities.”
On October 1, Iran fired over 180 missiles, including long-range ballistic ones, into Israel. The massive Iranian aerial attack was followed by Saturdays’s drone strike by Iran-backed Hezbollah on the private home of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The leak was first reported by Axios on Saturday.
Lebanon: Israel hunts for Hezbollah’s terrorist leadership continues
The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) continued hitting Hezbollah’s terror targets and decimating its command structure across Lebanon. On Sunday morning, Israeli jets “conducted an intelligence-based strike on a command center of Hezbollah’s intelligence headquarters and an underground weapons workshop in Beirut,” the IDF said in a press statement.
The Israeli Air Force also “struck and eliminated the terrorist Al-Haj Abbas Salama in the area of Tebnine, a senior commander in Hezbollah’s Southern Front. Salama oversaw combat in the Bint Jbeil area and executed many terror attacks against the State of Israel. Furthermore, Salama served in a number of positions in Hezbollah’s Southern Front over the years,” the Israeli military disclosed “Additionally, the terrorists Rada Abbas Awada and Ahmad Ali Hussein were eliminated. Awada was a senior Hezbollah communications expert and Hussein served as the head of a weapons manufacturing unit that was responsible for the build-up of Hezbollah’s strategic weaponry, following in-depth manufacturing training in Iran.”
Massive Hezbollah tunnel complex blown up by IDF today 👇
Billions of dollars of Iranian investment being vaporized. What a waste of money…
— Dr. Eli David (@DrEliDavid) October 19, 2024
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Comments
This puzzles me – Certainly I understand that there may be leaks in the U.S. Intelligence community and/or embedded spies.
However what I don’t understand is, having obtained such valuable information, is why you would post it publicly. Such information is much more valuable if no one knows it’s been stolen. Iran could then take counter-measures secretly to make an Israeli strike ineffective.
However if the Israelis know that their plan has been compromised, they will change it. Certainly there will be components that can’t be changed but anything like that could have been deduced by analysis, even without the leak.
So…. (insert “WHY” followed by question mark here)
Really good question.
Lots of possibilities. This could be entirely about domestic political infighting between pro-Iranian and pro-Israeli factions in our intelligence and defense communities. The fact that there’s no leader running the show in the executive branch lets the political infighting get crazier than it usually would.
Or the point could be to foil Israel’s operation, make them either cancel it or postpone it while they make changes. If they can force Israel to hold off until after the election, then whichever way the election goes the Dems won’t have to pretend to support Israel’s right to self defense anymore.
Simple, the administration was told to kick rocks by the Israelis. Someone up high decided to make an example of what it means to be an enemy instead of an ally. Now the whole world knows that you do what Obama says or else.
The issue here is that one or more of ‘the boys” (immature children housed in adult bodies) decided that Israel should NOT be more concerned about their own survival and security than about kowtowing to US “sensitivities” and hen made a move to compromise Israel’s rue security.
Such pey rebellion MUS be met with suitable consequences, but as long as he prsent administration remains, that will not happen.
Benedict Arnold was a lightweight in comparison.
The obvious answer is that the “leak” came from a non-professional spy. Just someone on the inside who wanted to help the cause (of fighting anti-Israel) but was not privy to any private information conduit. They didn’t know any trade craft, weren’t being “run” by any intel agency. Might not have even known who that would be.
So their problem was how to use this information to hurt Israel without getting arrested for espionage. Their solution was to submit it anonymously to a source that would be guarantied not to protect Israel and make it public instead.
Pseudo-journalism has been the new espionage for at least 50 years. It makes perfect sense for fellow travelers to exploit.
We already know that there are innumerable pro-Hamas, pro-Iran, pro-Islamofascist, pro-Muslim supremacist and terrorist sympathizers/enablers and anti-Israel zealots embedded in high positions at CIA, DoD, the State Department. Sadly, it is axiomatic that the same types of reprobates are widely present in the U.K., Canadian and Australian governments and intelligence agencies.
Decades of stupid, ignorant and morally bankrupt dhimmitude and leftist and Muslim supremacist propaganda and agitprop have brought us to the point where rabid, goose-stepping and genocidal Islamofascism, Muslim supremacism and terrorism are now characterized as allegedly righteous and laudable “resistance” against a never-ending and contrived array of sleights and grievances asserted by alleged Muslim “victims” and their non-Muslim, leftist/Dhimmi-crat allies and enablers.
Someone took the bait like a pallet of pagers.
This isn’t about missile placement as much as identifying sources.
The Israelis know that anything they share with the U.S. government will be leaked, so they never share any actual plans beforehand. This leak consisted of American guesses of what Israel plans to do, not any real information about those plans. It would not be surprising if Israel had fed our analysts a few fake clues with which to mislead Iran.
One can hope, anyway.
And since the Biden stooges are just that stupid to fall for it.
Disinformation can be a useful tool, not just for Democrats in elections.
…hence my thought that it is bait.
That would be a high form of justice on he part of Israel. Feed the skunks their favourite food, then go on your merry way and do what you must.
gangs
there is varying estimates of the % of actual gang members in the usa military
they try to make it like its only wht male k3
but the fact is the poc gangs reign supreme
add in the omar contingent that now runs the congressional narrative
Publishing the pictures constitute a major security breach in itself if they reveal our imaging capabilities. There are various technological tricks we use to enhance resolution of our spy satellites and other reconnaissance. Random fluctuations of the index of refraction in the atmosphere is a major source of image blurring. The classic work in the field is Wave Propagation in a Turbulent Medium by Tatarski. This stuff is really top secret, and goes way beyond the wars in Israel. One must view these pictures in a very secure facility. I hope we don’t share them with Five Eyes countries. So for these and other reasons I’m suspicious of the whole story.
I really hope this is distraction from the real action either coming or being carried out right now. I also hope this is the juices using Democrats to further the distraction by “leaking” supposed sensitive details of a coming strike to get the Iranians to spread their defences far a wide, thus negating any effectiveness they may have had?
One can only hope as a nuclear armed Iran is a big problem for the planet and they would have achieved their nuclear weapons thanks to Barry Hussein funding their programme to the tune of many hundreds of billions of dollars.
If it’s not and this is an example of Democrats protecting their voters in Tehran then people need to swing and swing long and loud!
Hope they were fake just to show how trustworthy friends can be and to justify not sharing any more.
The simple answer is the administration leaked it in order to push back the Israeli response to after the election. Finding the leaker would take less than 24 hours.
Second more complex answer is the Israelis did it to embarrass the administration for not getting something they asked for.
If it’s a leak of secret info during a Republican admin or about Israel, then it is not only permissible but politically correct. Do that to the Left/Dems and you get to chat with Seth Rich.
If I was a leak to harm Israel it failed. The leaker/leakers have miscalculated in a huge way. These images and internal assessments have TS Compartmented markings. Also they have compromised 5 Eyes intelligence products. The leakers most likely don’t realize that this is the type of breech that screams for scalps. Simply because the 5 Eyes partners demand it. Would you trust us with communication intelligence products.
“Serious questions loom as the Biden administration and the Pentagon struggle to explain how highly classified U.S. documents ended up in the hands of Iranians.”
Answer: Because our entire federal government is a galaxy-class f*g clownshow, and because no leftist is ever punished for anything anymore.
Except the occasional 21-year-old “gamer lord” in the Massachusetts National Guard who has no connections whatsoever.
Next question.
Well, Hunter has his legal fees . . . And 10% for the Big Guy.
Let me point out that Trump is showing far better judgement this campaign by NOT allowing the intelligence community to brief him before he is elected. Had he been taking security briefings, even if there was NOTHING about this in them, the whole mainstream media would be in full howl about how Trump did it with hundreds of articles designed to throw the early voters into a froth and charge to the polls with a Harris ballot in hand.
That being said, there is only one of two possibilities about the leaker.
1. The least probable is that the intelligence items were faked in various ways and fed to prospective leakers so the leak can be tracked back to the source and eliminated. That assumes competence, so probably not.
2. Some current administration pro-Hamas/anti-Israel staffer managed to get their hands on the information and promptly leaked it to help Hamas.
Door #2, by someone “helping the cause”.
Don’t forget the “Five Eyes”.
“Billions of dollars of Iranian investment being vaporized. What a waste of money…”
Now billions of dollars worth of destruction should occur in Iran. Leave them so broke that they no longer have the capacity to fund terrorists.
T00 bad the next ten top choices for the next hamass leader weren’t in the tunnels as they blew up.
My sense of things at this point is that the hamassies don’t HAVE that many backup candidates for op leadership. They’ve kpt the high altiude top leadership so cloisered and protected they’ve not been able to raise up new leadership by the seasoned top guys. This move of late by IDF is very much a game changer. hey have penetraed the enemy’s security lid and taken out top end leadership so quickly they’ve no been able to replace them with mature seasned upper crust. The top is too small a club, too few members, and when the kingpins are vapourised, there is litle of quality with which to replace them. That leads quickly to the destabilisation of the whole show, Israel’s goal. Funny how they bowed and scraped to Uncle Stupid for so long, getting beaten up along the way, and only lately have made the necessary shift to sidelining the US “leadership” and going it on their own.
Let the kinyun and his phantom replacement kick rocks. I hope they stub their toes, hard.
“…fearing that the escalating tit-for-tats could spark a wider war, drawing in others in the region,” ”
If the IDF does it right, the capability to respond won’t be there. As for the “wider war”, that’s in line with the administration’s Putin’s nuclear WW III claims. Syria, probably. Other Arab countries with military power – not likely.
Smoke out the parties responsible, try them as terrorists and if guilty, hang them.
I think you can definitely thank the Biden administration for the leaks. And what is the “Five Eyes” allies — Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom,”
One country was left out. But these countries have had some of the largest anti-Israel protests in the world. Not countries to be trusted in my book. Certainly one of their military leaders could have posted it.
Also, the Telegram messaging service is owned by Pavel Durov, a Russian business executive, entrepreneur, and investor who is a co-founder and the chief executive officer of Telegram. Seems like a pretty neutral platform to receive top secret American documents to me? Lol.