Israeli intelligence officials yelled at their American counterparts in meetings, in reaction to the news that President Trump may have compromised an agent inside ISIS or Iran, according to a Friday Foreign Policy report quoting a “US defense official in military planning.”
“To them, it’s horrifying,” the official told Foreign Policy about the meeting in which he had participated. “Their first question was: ‘What is going on? What is this?’”
Apparently, even as Donald Trump is getting ready to visit the Holy Land for the first time as a US President, Israeli intelligence officials are perturbed over the possibility that everything they share from now on with their exulted visitor would find its way into the hands of the likes of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
Former Mossad chief Danny Yatom told CBS News on Wednesday that Israel must “think twice before transferring information to the Americans.” Yatom stressed that the damaged relationship can be restored relatively easily, but not should the president continue to leak secrets.
Pointing out that Israel is much less troubled than the US by ISIS, which has been keeping a respectful distance from the Jewish State, which makes the fact that Trump leaked their information to the Russians even more injurious. “We have a partner that has done us a favor. They went out of their way to support us in a campaign against ISIS, that they have no real skin in,” the defense official told Foreign Policy.
According to the same official, the Israelis prepared themselves for a working relationship with a new US president who was a complete novice when it came to military and intelligence operations and procedures, but they felt blindsided by a president who just stepped on “one of their most sensitive of accesses,” the defense official told Foreign Policy, who explained that “sources aren’t infinite.”
In his opinion, should Israel shut the door on providing real-time, sensitive information for fear that the US cannot be trusted with it, this could spell grave danger to US forces in the field as well as to the US civilian population.