Edited by: Fern Sidman

On Sunday, it was reported by Israel National News that two leading American newspapers, the New York Times and the Washington Post indicated that among the classified American intelligence documents from the Central Intelligence Agency which have been leaked online in recent days is an assessment that senior members of Israel’s Mossad spy agency encouraged the agency’s employees and the general population in Israel to protest against the Israeli government’s planned judicial reforms.

The leaked materials, which made headlines of several major U.S. publications, contain an assessment by a CIA Intel Update dated March 1, as was reported by i24News.com. It said that the Mossad leadership “advocated for Mossad officials and Israeli citizens to protest against the new Israeli government’s proposed judicial reforms, including several explicit calls to action that decried the Israeli government.”

INN reported that the FBI is investigating the leak, and it is currently believed that the leaked documents are authentic. Both newspapers reported that senior Israeli officials denied the reports.

I24 News also reported that Israel’s Prime Minister’s Office on Sunday denied reports based on the leaked Pentagon documents alleging that the Mossad encouraged Israelis to participate in mass protests against the government’s judicial reform plan.

“The publication tonight in the American press is completely false and unfounded,” Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement, as was reported by i24News. “The Mossad and its officials did not and do not encourage employees in the organization to go to demonstrations against the government, to political demonstrations in general, or to any political activity,” the statement added.

“The report that was published overnight in the American press is mendacious and without any foundation whatsoever. The Mossad and its senior officials did not – and do not – encourage agency personnel to join the demonstrations against the government, political demonstrations or any political activity. The Mossad and its serving senior personnel have not engaged in the issue of the demonstrations at all and are dedicated to the value of service to the state that has guided the Mossad since its founding,” the Prime Minister’s Office reported, according to the INN report.

In February, Mossad chief David Barnea issued an unusual authorization allowing Mossad employees to participate in the anti-judicial reform protests, and former heads of the Mossad publicly called for the freezing of the judicial reform legislation, INN reported. It is possible that these events are what the intelligence assessment is referring to.

On the Israeli news web site known as Ynet, New York Times reporter Ronen Bergman suggested that the analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) must have misinterpreted the signals intelligence, as was reported by i24 News. But the more important conclusion is the agency’s deep penetration into the top branches of Israeli government, the report indicated.

According to The New York Times, senior U.S. officials confirmed that the leaked documents appear to contain legitimate intelligence reports, as was reported by i24News.com.  However, at least some of them had been modified and the accuracy of the documents is under question.

Despite several hundreds of former Mossad employees signing a letter published in early March in protest of the judicial overhaul, the agency’s rules prohibit direct involvement of its leadership in political crisis, as was reported by i24News.  Some Mossad employees, however, received permission to participate in protests as private citizens, the report claimed.

Senior Israeli defense officials denied the reports, while the Prime Minister’s office told The New York Times that they were looking into them, according to the i24News.com report. The U.S. Department of Justice said earlier on Saturday that it had opened a probe into the leak.

“We have been in communication with the Department of Defense related to this matter and have begun an investigation,” a Justice Department spokesperson told AFP.

In January of this year, the Jerusalem Post reported that former CIA director and Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, in his new book, “Never Give An Inch,” reveals that during his term, the spy agency rescued Mossad agents in imminent peril at the personal request of then-Mossad director Yossi Cohen.

Israeli intelligence sources repeatedly denied to The Jerusalem Post in late January that the operation in question was the February 2018 heist of the century – seizing Iran’s secret nuclear archive from under its nose near the heart of Tehran – though Pompeo in his book specifically says that the operation was “one of the most significant clandestine operations ever conducted.”

The JPost also reported that these sources also would not specify what other operation could have reached the level of significance as described by Pompeo, but were adamant that Americans were not involved in the 2018 Tehran archive operation.

Describing one of several interactions with then Mossad director Yossi Cohen, but without giving the exact date, Pompeo recounts hearing from an aide, “Mr. Director, Mossad Director Yossi Cohen needs to speak with you immediately,” the JPost reported.

“The call from Yossi Cohen, the head of the Mossad, arrived shortly after I had stepped off a plane in a European capital. I turned around and went back onboard, where we had communications equipment suitable for a classified conversation with the leader of Israel’s intelligence agency,” writes Pompeo in his book, according to the JPost report in January.

Dozens of leaked documents, mostly related to the Ukraine war, have surfaced on Twitter, Telegram, Discord and other social media in recent days, i24News.com reported. On Friday, the Pentagon said it was “actively reviewing the matter.”

The New York Times reported on Saturday that the leaked Pentagon documents reveal how deeply Russia’s security and intelligence services have been penetrated by the United States, demonstrating Washington’s ability to warn Ukraine about planned strikes and providing an assessment of the strength of Moscow’s war machine.

The NYT also reported that the documents portray a battered Russian military that is struggling in its war in Ukraine and a military apparatus that is deeply compromised. They contain daily real-time warnings to American intelligence agencies on the timing of Moscow’s strikes and even its specific targets. Such intelligence has allowed the United States to pass on to Ukraine crucial information on how to defend itself.

The leak, the source of which remains unknown, also reveals the American assessment of a Ukrainian military that is itself in dire straits, the NYT reported. The leaked material, from late February and early March but found on social media sites in recent days, outlines critical shortages of air defense munitions and discusses the gains being made by Russian troops around the eastern city of Bakhmut.

The intelligence reports seem to indicate that the United States is also spying on Ukraine’s top military and political leaders, a reflection of Washington’s struggle to get a clear view of Ukraine’s fighting strategies, the NYT reported.

World Israel News reported on Monday that according to confidential Pentagon documents that were leaked online, the US government has been consistently pressuring Israel to send lethal weapons to Ukraine and outlined a number of scenarios in which Jerusalem could be forced to break its neutrality in the conflict.

A document from late February viewed by NBC News explains that “the most plausible” scenario for Israeli material support for Ukraine would see Jerusalem finally cave to U.S. pressure and sell Kiev “lethal defense systems or provide them through third-party entities,” as was reported by WIN.

Publicly, Israel would call for peace and offer “to host mediation efforts,” the document said.

The U.S. is particularly interested in seeing the Israeli Javelin missile system transferred to the Ukrainian military. WIN reported that the document also suggested that Russia’s support of Iranian militias in Syria or its support of Iran’s military initiatives could be wielded against Israel to convince Jerusalem to formally side with Kiev.

Since the onset of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Israel has avoided publicly taking sides in the conflict.

WIN also reported that one reason for Israel’s refusal to align with the U.S. and Europe on the conflict is due to the fact that Russia has de facto control over Syrian airspace. Israel regularly carries out strikes on Iranian assets in Syria and would likely lose the ability to continue the practice should it align itself with the Ukrainian cause.

Although Israel has provided humanitarian aid to Ukraine, such as setting up a multimillion-dollar field hospital in the country, both Kiev and Washington have urged Jerusalem to abandon its neutrality, as was reported by WIN.

U.S. spies caught Russian intelligence officers boasting that they had convinced the oil-rich United Arab Emirates “to work together against US and UK intelligence agencies,” according to a purported American document posted online as part of a major U.S. intelligence breach, the AP reported on Tuesday.

U.S. officials declined to comment on the document, which bore known top-secret markings and was viewed by The Associated Press. The Emirati government on Monday dismissed any accusation that the UAE had deepened ties with Russian intelligence as “categorically false.”

But the U.S. has had growing concerns that the UAE was allowing Russia and Russians to thwart sanctions imposed over the invasion of Ukraine, the AP reported.

The document viewed by the AP includes an item citing research from March 9 with the title: “Russia/UAE: Intelligence Relationship Deepening.” U.S. officials declined to confirm the document’s authenticity, which the AP could not independently do. However, it resembled other documents released as part of the recent leak.

The Justice Department has opened an investigation into the possible release of Pentagon documents that were posted on several social media sites, as was reported by the AP. They appear to detail U.S. and NATO aid to Ukraine and U.S. intelligence assessments regarding U.S. allies that could strain ties with those nations.

Some of the documents may have been altered or used as part of a misinformation campaign, U.S. officials said, the AP reported. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby on Monday urged caution, “since we know at least in some cases that information was doctored.”

Referring to the main successor agency of the Soviet-era KGB, the document seen by the AP says: “In mid-January, FSB officials claimed UAE security service officials and Russia had agreed to work together against US and UK Intelligence agencies, according to newly acquired signals intelligence.” Signals intelligence refers to intercepted communications, whether telephone calls or electronic messages.

“The UAE probably views engagement with Russian intelligence as an opportunity to strengthen growing ties between Abu Dhabi and Moscow and diversify intelligence partnerships amid concerns of US disengagement from the region,” the assessment concluded, referring to the UAE capital, the AP said.

It’s not clear if there was any such agreement as described in the UAE-Russia document, or whether the alleged FSB claims were intentionally or unintentionally misleading, as was reported by the AP. But American officials are speaking out increasingly about a surge in dealings between the UAE and Russia.

A U.S. Treasury official, Assistant Secretary Elizabeth Rosenberg, in March singled out the UAE as a “country of focus.” The AP reported that she said businesses there were helping Russia evade international sanctions to obtain more than $5 million in U.S. semiconductors and other export-controlled parts, including components with battlefield uses.

On Monday, the AP reported that the major leak of classified U.S. documents that’s shaken Washington and exposed new details of its intelligence gathering may have started in a chatroom on a social media platform popular with gamers.

Held on the Discord platform, which hosts real-time voice, video and text chats, a discussion originally created to talk about a range of topics turned to the war in Ukraine, as was reported by the AP. As part of debates about Ukraine, according to one member of the chat, an unidentified poster shared documents that were allegedly classified, first typing them out with the poster’s own thoughts, then, as of a few months ago, beginning to post images of papers with folds in them.

The posts appear to have gone unnoticed outside of the chat until a few weeks ago, when they began to circulate more widely on social media and get picked up by major news outlets, as was indicated in the AP report. The leaks have alarmed U.S. officials and sparked a Justice Department investigation.

The records have provided startling and surprisingly timely details of U.S. and NATO assistance to Ukraine. The AP reported that they also provided clues about efforts to assist Ukraine in its war with Russia, including an anticipated spring offensive.

The scale of the exposure has yet to be determined, the AP reported. Also unclear is whether any government worked to share the documents or manipulate them.

Asked Monday if the U.S. government was effectively waiting for more intelligence documents to show up online, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby replied: “The truth and the honest answer to your question is: We don’t know. And is that a matter of concern to us? You’re darn right it is,” according to the AP report.

Chris Meagher, top spokesman for the Pentagon, urged caution in “promoting or amplifying any of these documents,” adding that “it does appear that slides have been doctored.”

But the breach underscores the difficulties the U.S. and other governments face in securing classified information. According to the AP report, congressional reviews and experts have long warned of weaknesses in U.S. counterintelligence, of the challenges of monitoring an estimated 3 million people with security clearances, and of agencies producing and over-classifying so much information that the U.S. cannot reliably control it.

The Associated Press interviewed a person who said he was a member of the Discord chat group in which documents appeared for several months. The person, who said he was 18 years old, refused to give his name, citing concerns for his personal safety.

The AP could not independently confirm many details shared by the person, and the original chatroom has been deleted.

“As many of these were pictures of documents, it appears that it was a deliberate leak done by someone that wished to damage the Ukraine, U.S., and NATO efforts,” Mick Mulroy, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, told ABC, as was reported by The Epoch Times.

“Russia’s obvious manipulation of some facts has made it more difficult to determine what is real and what is not,” said Mulroy. “Something that may help somewhat limit the damage overall ironically.”

The Epoch Times also reported that Mulroy addressed the matter of the investigation into the leak, saying he expects the probe to be “very thorough in finding out how this happened and who was responsible.”

(Sources: AP.com. NYT.com, i24News.com, IsraelNationalNews.com, TheEpochTimes.com, WorldIsraelNews.com)