Israel Planted Spying Devices At The White House

[yankeedoodle]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLxBp8fgmLw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YeoZ7nScOg

Israel reportedly planted tiny surveillance devices near the White House to spy on Donald Trump, but faced no consequences
https://www.businessinsider.com/israel-planted-devices-near-white-house-spy-on-trump-report-2019-9

- Israel is believed by US intelligence to be responsible for planting surveillance devices near the White House in a bid to spy on US President Donald Trump, Politico reported Thursday.

- The Trump administration has reportedly not confronted Israel following the discovery of surveillance devices planted around Washington DC.

- In a statement, the office of the Israeli embassy in the US denied the country conducts any espionage operations within the US.

US intelligence services think Israel is responsible for planting cellphone surveillance devices near the White House, and in other sensitive locations in Washington DC, to spy on President Donald Trump, Politico reported on Thursday.

The tiny surveillance devices were found in locations across the US capital, and were planted in an attempt to access communications between Trump and allies and aides, three former US officials told the site.

Officials at the Department of Homeland Security reportedly discovered the devices at some point over the last two years and told the Trump administration, with Israel believed to have most likely been responsible.

Politico reports that they were StingRays, a type of device capable of capturing texts, emails, phone calls, and location data from nearby cellphones by tricking the phones into thinking it is communicating with a real cell tower.

It is not clear whether the devices successfully gathered any sensitive information.

Despite the suspicions of intelligence services, the Trump administration has not confronted Israel about the espionage and Israel has not been held to account, Politico reported.

"It was pretty clear that the Israelis were responsible," a former intelligence official told the publication.

In a statement to Politico, the Israeli embassy denied being responsible for the devices.

"These allegations are absolute nonsense. Israel doesn't conduct espionage operations in the United States, period," a spokesperson told the publication.

The US is among Israel's staunchest global allies, but that has not prevented Israel seeking to steal US secrets.

Back in 2014, Obama administration officials told Newsweek that Israel had "crossed red lines" rarely encountered in the past in their bid to obtain sensitive information from the US.

[yankeedoodle]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKdmx0rVXAs&t=2648s

Trump doesn't believe Israel spied on him but adds 'anything's possible'
https://www.rt.com/news/468715-trump-spying-israel-possible/?utm_source=browser&utm_medium=aplication_chrome&utm_campaign=chrome

US President Donald Trump said he finds it hard to believe Israel may have spied on the White House using cell-phone eavesdropping devices, after everything he's done for them – but left open the possibility the charges are true.

"I don't think the Israelis are spying on us. I really would find that hard to believe," Trump told reporters outside the White House on Thursday, adding, "My relationship with Israel has been great."

As an illustration, the US president brought up his recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital, as well as the claim to the Golan Heights (taken from Syria in 1967), and exiting the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, so opposed by PM Benjamin Netanyahu.

"Anything is possible, but I don't believe it," Trump said.

Speculations that Israel might be snooping on high-ranking officials in the White House have been rekindled by a recent Politico report, which claimed that Israeli spies might have rigged "sensitive locations" around Washington, DC with devices known as 'StingRays.' The devices can not only track cell phone signals, but also eavesdrop on the content of conversations.

Politico alleged that US officials first discovered the devices in 2018, but chose to keep the find under wraps. Tel Aviv is believed to have a long history of spying on the US government, including listening in on sensitive diplomatic talks. Israel has vehemently denied all the allegations, however.

[yankeedoodle]

From Phil Giraldi:

Israel Spies and Spies and Spies
This time the target was Donald Trump
http://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/israel-spies-and-spies-and-spies/

Here we go again! Israel is caught red handed spying against the United States and everyone in Congress is silent, as are nearly all the mainstream media which failed to report the story. And the federal government itself, quick to persecute a Russian woman who tried to join the NRA, concedes that the White House and Justice Department have done absolutely nothing to either rebuke or punish the Israeli perpetrators. One senior intelligence official commented that "I'm not aware of any accountability at all."

Only President Donald Trump, predictably, had something so say in his usual personalized fashion, which was that the report was "hard to believe," that "I don't think the Israelis were spying on us. My relationship with Israel has been great...Anything is possible but I don't believe it."

Ironically, the placement of technical surveillance devices by Israel was clearly intended to target cellphone communications to and from the Trump White House. As the president frequently chats with top aides and friends on non-secure phones, the operation sought to pick up conversations involving Trump with the expectation that the security-averse president would say things off the record that might be considered top secret.

The Politico report, which is sourced to top intelligence and security officials, details how "miniature surveillance devices" referred to as "Stingrays" imitate regular cell phone towers to fool phones being used nearby into providing information on their locations and identities. According to the article, the devices are referred to by technicians as "international mobile subscriber identity-catchers or IMSI-catchers, they also can capture the contents of calls and data use."

Over one year ago, government security agencies discovered the electronic footprints that indicated the presence of the surveillance devices around Washington including near the White House. Forensic analysis involved dismantling the devices to let them "tell you a little about their history, where the parts and pieces come from, how old are they, who had access to them, and that will help get you to what the origins are." One source observed afterwards that "It was pretty clear that the Israelis were responsible."

The Israeli Embassy denied any involvement in the espionage and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu adroitly and predictably lied regarding the report, saying "We have a directive, I have a directive: No intelligence work in the United States, no spies. And it's vigorously implemented, without any exception. It is a complete fabrication, a complete fabrication."

The Israelis are characteristically extremely aggressive in their intelligence gathering operations, particularly in targeting the United States, even though Trump has done the Netanyahu government many favors. These have included moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, withdrawing from the nuclear deal and sanctioning Iran, recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and looking the other way as Israel expands its settlements and regularly bombs Syria and Lebanon.

Israel's high-risk spying is legendary, but the notion that it is particularly good at it is, like everything having to do with the Jewish state, much overrated. Mossad has been caught in flagrante numerous times. In 2010, an undercover Mossad hit team was caught on 30 minutes of surveillance video as it wandered through a luxury Dubai hotel where it had gone to kill a leading Hamas official. And the notion that Mossad and CIA work hand-in-hand is also a fiction. Working level Agency officers dislike their reckless Mossad counterparts. Newsweek magazine's "Spy Talk" once cited a poll of CIA officers that ranked Israel "dead last" among friendly countries in actual intelligence cooperation with Washington.

The fact is that Israel conducts espionage and influence operations against the United States more aggressively than any other "friendly" country, including tapping White House phones used by Bill Clinton to speak with Monica Lewinski. Israeli "experts" regularly provide alarmist and inaccurate private briefings for American Senators on Capitol Hill. Israel also constantly manufactures pretexts to draw the U.S. into new conflicts in the Middle East, starting with the Lavon Affair in Alexandria Egypt in 1954 and including the false flag attack on the U.S.S. Liberty in 1967. In short, Israel has no reluctance to use its enormous political and media clout in the U.S. to pressure successive administrations to conform to its own foreign and security policy views.

The persistent spying, no matter what Netanyahu claims, is a very good reason why Israel should not receive billions of dollars in military assistance annually. Starting in 1957, Israel's friends stole enriched uranium from a Pennsylvania refinery to create a nuclear arsenal. More recently we have learned how Arnon Milchan, a Hollywood producer/billionaire born in Israel, arranged the illegal purchase of 800 krytron triggers to use in the production of nuclear weapons. The operation also involved current Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.

The existence of a large scale Israeli spying effort at the time of 9/11 has been widely reported, incorporating Israeli companies in New Jersey and Florida as well as hundreds of "art students" nationwide. Five "dancing" Israelis from one of the companies were observed celebrating against the backdrop of the twin towers going down.

While it is often observed that everyone spies on everyone else, espionage is a high-risk business, particularly when spying on friends. Israel, relying on Washington for billions of dollars and also for political cover in international fora like the United Nations, does not spy discreetly, largely because it knows that few in Washington will seek to hold it accountable. There were, for example, no consequences for the Israelis when Israeli Mossad intelligence officers using U.S. passports and pretending to be Americans recruited terrorists to carry out attacks inside Iran. Israelis using U.S. passports in that fashion put every American traveler at risk.

Israel, where government and business work hand in hand, has obtained significant advantage by systematically stealing American technology with both military and civilian applications. The U.S. developed technology is then reverse engineered and used by the Israelis to support their own exports. Sometimes, when the technology is military in nature and winds up in the hands of an adversary, the consequences can be serious. Israel has sold advanced weapons systems to China that incorporate technology developed by American companies.

The reality of Israeli large-scale spying in the United States is indisputable. One might cite Jonathan Pollard, who stole more highly classified information than any spy in history. And then there were Ben-Ami Kadish, Stuart Nozette and Larry Franklin, other spies for Israel who have been caught and tried, but they are only the tip of the iceberg. Israel always features prominently in the annual FBI report called "Foreign Economic Collection and Industrial Espionage." The 2005 report states "Israel has an active program to gather proprietary information within the United States. These collection activities are primarily directed at obtaining information on military systems and advanced computing applications that can be used in Israel's sizable armaments industry." It adds that Israel recruits spies, uses electronic methods, and carries out computer intrusion to gain the information.

A 1996 Defense Investigative Service report noted that Israel has great success stealing technology by exploiting the numerous co-production projects that it has with the Pentagon. It says "Placing Israeli nationals in key industries ...is a technique utilized with great success." A General Accounting Office (GAO) examination of espionage directed against American defense and security industries described how Israeli citizens residing in the U.S. had stolen sensitive technology to manufacture artillery gun tubes, obtained classified plans for reconnaissance systems, and passed sensitive aerospace designs to unauthorized users.

The GAO has concluded that Israel "conducts the most aggressive espionage operation against the United States of any U.S. ally." In June 2006, a Pentagon administrative judge ruled against a difficult to even imagine appeal by an Israeli denied a security clearance, saying that "The Israeli government is actively engaged in military and industrial espionage in the United States." FBI counter intelligence officer John Cole has also reported how many cases of Israeli espionage are dropped under orders from the Justice Department., making the Jewish state's spying consequence free. He provides a "conservative estimate" of 125 viable investigations into Israeli espionage involving both American citizens and Israelis that were stopped due to political pressure.

So, did Israel really spy on Donald Trump? Sure it did. And Netanyahu is, metaphorically speaking, thumbing his nose at the American president and asking with a grin, "What are you going to do about it?"