Newly declassified CIA materials reveal: Americans hardly knew any Israeli secrets

According to a legend believed by the public and even in the government’s security branches, the Americans know – or can know – everything about Israel. They eavesdrop, they photograph, they spy. They have agents at the top – in the government and the army. They have ears and listen; they have eyes and see. This is bad because it’s hard to hide things from them. And this is good if we want to inform them of something indirectly, as a fact or a bluff.

How incorrect that feeling is, or at least, how untrue it was in the pre-computer era – because today the situation may be different – can be discovered from thousands of classified documents of the Central Intelligence Agency that are related to Israel and which, in recent weeks, have become accessible to anyone who is curious and bored.

Almost 1 million such papers, which include everything in the universe, were discovered in the seam between the administration of former U.S. President Barack Obama and new President Donald Trump.

Some of them were available previously, but reading them required reporting to the U.S. National Archives in a Washington suburb. Now the flood has arrived and everything is accessible. Most of the documents were produced by the CIA, but occasionally one finds among them rare copies of materials from the foreign and defense ministries or other intelligence agencies, which were transferred for perusal by the CIA and remained in the collection permanently. Not everything has been publicized, and even in what was publicized, there are paragraphs and even pages that were strongly censored, especially nuclear information.

But a survey of the materials – much more than a sampling, but still partial – reveals the big CIA-Israeli secret: they knew hardly any secrets. A lot of gossip, false ideas, an analysis of political and social trends on the level of open journalism, the Knesset cafeteria or embassy telegrams.