The Pentagon recently elevated Israel's counterintelligence threat level to "critical" and is ramping up responses to alleged Israeli espionage targeting senior American officials, including those involved in negotiations to end the Iran war, the Daily Caller reported, citing NBC News and New York Times accounts.
Both the White House and the Israeli Embassy in Washington denied the allegations. The Pentagon declined to comment to either outlet.
But the reports, sourced to anonymous current and former U.S. officials, raise uncomfortable questions about the limits of an alliance that has cost American taxpayers billions and, according to one former senior counterterrorism official, left the United States playing the fool.
NBC News published Friday that the Pentagon had raised Israel's counterintelligence threat level to "critical," citing three anonymous current and former U.S. officials. The designation signals a serious and active intelligence concern, not a routine diplomatic friction.
The New York Times followed Saturday afternoon with a report that U.S. intelligence indicated Israel had made efforts to listen in on conversations involving senior American officials, including Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, one of the lead negotiators in peace talks with Iran. Two anonymous senior U.S. military officials told the Times that American personnel now protect their phones and electronics when traveling to Israel.
The Times report also noted that Israel and the United States have both long spied on each other and have known about and tolerated such activity. But the current concern, the reports suggest, involves something more targeted, alleged efforts to penetrate the diplomatic process itself.
A White House official pushed back hard:
"This entire story is false and sourced to someone who doesn't have any knowledge of what's going on."
A spokesperson for the Israeli Embassy in D.C. was equally categorical, telling NBC News:
"Israel does not gather intelligence on American entities, let alone US government officials."
The embassy called the allegations "completely false." The Daily Caller News Foundation requested comment from both the White House and the Department of War; neither responded immediately.
Those denials are worth noting. They are also, in the intelligence world, entirely standard, regardless of what is actually happening. The more telling detail may be the Pentagon's own actions: raising a counterintelligence threat level is not a press release. It is an operational decision with real consequences for how military and intelligence personnel handle classified information around an allied nation.
The allegations land against a backdrop of increasingly public claims from former intelligence officials about Israel's espionage activities on American soil. Former CIA officer and whistleblower John Kiriakou, in an interview with podcaster Theo Von that aired Friday, disputed the idea that Israeli and American spying on each other is a two-way street.
"The Israelis spy on the United States. They've always spied on the United States."
When Von asked, "Do we spy on them also?" Kiriakou answered flatly: "No."
"And that's written in stone at the CIA. We do not spy on Israel, but they openly spy on us. They're all over the country stealing defense secrets."
Kiriakou claimed a "political decision" by the White House and Congress prevents the U.S. from spying on Israel, a restraint he said Israel does not reciprocate. The former officer said "almost every" gift brought by Israeli officials to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, contained listening devices.
"We don't allow the Israelis into CIA headquarters because they would always come with gifts and the gifts had always listening devices packed inside them. And, you know, somebody brings you a gift, you X-ray it. It's the normal process."
In an appearance on Patrick Bet-David's Valuetainment program in July 2025, Kiriakou was asked what percentage of Israeli gifts contained bugs. His answer: "100%."
He added that the Israelis "were serious. They were hoping one would slip through." Kiriakou's claims are those of a single former officer, not confirmed by the agencies involved. But they are consistent with a pattern of concern that has now apparently reached the Pentagon's formal threat-assessment process.
In an April interview with Tucker Carlson, Kiriakou went further, claiming that U.S. alignment with Israel's foreign policy priorities had damaged relationships with traditional allies. The broader battles over how the administration manages its alliances and spending priorities have been a recurring tension in Trump's second term.
"Now, we disagree on basic fundamentals of foreign policy. We have in some cases an actively hostile relationship... mostly with the Canadians, sometimes with the Brits to the point where it's impacting the relationship now."
Joe Kent, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center who resigned his post over opposition to the conflict with Iran, reacted to both reports on X. Kent has maintained that Israel pressured the U.S. into the ongoing conflict despite his view that Iran did not pose an "imminent" threat.
"Israel targeting senior U.S. officials cannot be accepted by our government. This is not standard practice, especially considering the fact that Israel survives on our defense funding & diplomatic top cover."
Kent did not stop there:
"Until we actually take away the support we give Israel they will keep playing us as fools."
That is strong language from a man who held one of the most sensitive counterterrorism positions in the federal government. And it reflects a growing faction on the right, not the anti-Israel left, but national-security conservatives, who believe the relationship has become dangerously one-sided.
The administration's own internal tensions on this front are well documented. The New York Times reported in early April that Israeli officials convinced the Trump administration to wage war on Iran after pitching an attack plan at a top-secret White House meeting. CIA Director John Ratcliffe reportedly denounced the Israeli plan as "farcical." Secretary of State Marco Rubio called it "bulls***." Yet U.S. and Israeli forces launched joint attacks on Iran on February 28, just 17 days after the alleged meeting.
The gap between what senior cabinet officials reportedly thought of the plan and what actually happened raises its own set of questions. Those questions become sharper if the ally that helped drive the decision was simultaneously running intelligence operations against the American negotiators trying to end the resulting war.
Allies spy on each other. That is not news. What is news, or should be, is when an ally that depends on American defense funding and diplomatic protection allegedly targets the specific officials conducting negotiations that could end a war that ally helped start.
The administration deserves credit for raising the counterintelligence threat level, if the NBC News report is accurate. That is a concrete operational step, not a press conference. But the broader question is whether anyone in Washington is willing to attach consequences to the behavior, or whether the pattern Kiriakou described, of discovering bugs, shaking heads, and moving on, simply continues.
Kent's challenge is direct: take away the support, or accept being played. The leadership at the Justice Department and across the national security apparatus will eventually have to decide whether these allegations warrant more than a threat-level change and a round of denials.
Conservative voters who supported this administration did so in part because they were tired of a foreign policy establishment that refused to hold allies accountable. They wanted leaders who would fight for American interests first, not just rhetorically, but operationally.
The Pentagon's decision to raise the threat level suggests someone inside the building is taking this seriously. The White House's blanket denial suggests someone else would rather the whole thing go away.
Both responses cannot be right. And the American taxpayers funding this alliance deserve to know which one reflects reality.
Several key questions remain unanswered. What specific methods were allegedly used? Which officials beyond Witkoff were targeted? What exact date did the threat level change? And what, if anything, will the administration do beyond internal classification adjustments? The Pentagon's silence and the White House's denial leave a vacuum that neither ongoing investigations involving administration allies nor diplomatic niceties can fill forever.
An ally that needs your money, your weapons, and your diplomatic cover should not also need to bug your negotiators. If the reports are even half true, the question is not whether Israel spied. It is whether America will finally act like a country that notices.
