Israel and the United States have long known, and tolerated, that each was spying on the other. But an intensified Israeli effort to learn about U.S. positions in talks with Iran has crossed a line, according to some American officials...Another report, written by the Defense Intelligence Agency and other military intelligence offices and focused on earlier events going back several years, said that the counterintelligence threat level posed by Israel had been increased in recent weeks to the top level, from high to critical. The report, to which the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency contributed, outlines various efforts by Israel to spy on American military personnel and government officials.
Assuming the report is accurate, which seems likely enough, the threat level was already assessed as "high," and is now "critical." Formal reports were drawn up about it, and action taken within the CI infrastructure. That doesn't quite line up with the popular view of our government as crawling to obey Israeli orders. I tend to think that the Israelis are a bit over their skis on Iran, having used up a substantial quantity of their intelligence advantages there as a set of favors to back American action. It'll take them years or decades to recover those advantages if they need to do.
* The title is a Roman Numeral joke; 101 is "CI." When I was at CENTCOM, they had decided to rename their Public Affairs to 'Communications Integration,' giving them the same initials as 'Counterintelligence.' You should have seen people's faces when somebody from Public Affairs would drop by to chat and some yeoman would inform the officer in charge that "CI is here to talk to you."
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