Israel Preps for Strike on Iran, Top Secret Leak Reveals

Read the U.S. intelligence reports the media won’t publish

Asked if he knew what Israel would do to Iran and when, President Biden’s response on Friday was terse: “Yes and yes.” 

Yes because Netanyahu told him in the strictest of confidences. Yes because the United States has a high-level spy in Israel’s ranks. Yes because the U.S. picked up a crucial telephone conversation or intercepted the order as it was transmitted via email. Yes because of all of these reasons and more. 

The United States aggressively spies on Israel, because as Ronald Reagan once said: “Trust but verify.”

The extent of that spying is revealed in a pair of highly classified U.S. intelligence reports I have published below. They first circulated on social media this week and they provide extraordinary insight into how closely the U.S. is monitoring Israel amid a particularly fraught moment.

With the recent deaths of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and Iran’s retaliatory strike, and then with the death of Hamas architect of October 7, Yahya Sinwar, Israel has pledged that it will again attack Iran. It is evidently planning something big. 

Two Top Secret documents outlining Israel’s preparations for a large-scale attack on Iran – which would be Israel’s largest, and here’s what’s most interesting: the mainstream media is silent. Colleagues at some of the biggest media outlets, from The New York Times to NBC, tell me that their outlets are aware of the documents. But it’s been days and no one in the sanctioned elite press is reporting on them (Axios only just reported their existence but declined to publish the documents themselves). As with the J.D. Vance Dossier, which the entire media knew about but refused to publish, it appears the media has once again lost its nerve – and its sense of what’s news.

The mainstream media has generally decided that it won’t publish classified material, in effect deputizing themselves as enforcers of the national security state’s secrecy regime. They did this last year with highly classified Ukraine documents they refused to publish (which my editor published at Newsweek).

To put it bluntly, major media are petrified of running afoul of the national security state. And not without reason. My decision to publish the Vance Dossier got me a visit from the FBI, thrown off X (Twitter) and links to the story were blocked on the platform along with Meta’s Facebook, Instagram and even Google Docs. Let’s see if that happens again here.

Despite all the happy talk from Washington about the U.S.’s “ironclad” relationship with Israel, the U.S. spies on them just like any other country, as we recently reported. The two top secret U.S. intelligence reports illustrate this dynamic beautifully. Both were produced on October 16, by the Pentagon’s National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which is responsible for the preparation of geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) and of authoritative (and often classified) maps. 

The first intelligence report is titled, “Israel: Defense Forces Continue Key Munitions Preparations and Covert UAV Activity Almost Certainly for a Strike on Iran.” The Top Secret document provides a sense of not just how much the intelligence community knows, but how much it doesn’t know. “We cannot definitively predict the scale and scope of a strike on Iran, and such a strike can occur with no further GEOINT warning,” the report states. In English, that means that based upon scrutiny of satellite, aircraft, and drone imagery, NGA doesn’t necessarily have the tools (by itself) to provide what they call “actionable” intelligence, to warn of an Israeli strike. It is raw reporting that has to be combined with that of other agencies – NSA, CIA, DIA, and on and on – for a full picture.

The lack of certainty is not a defect of the intelligence; it speaks to how complex intelligence work actually is and the vast $100 plus billion a year effort. Contrary to the popular imagination of a deep throat-like source delivering the truth in a shadowy garage, intelligence work involves drawing together information from all kinds of different sources to create a mosaic-like picture of what’s going on. 

The intelligence report includes a rundown of the various aspects of Israeli military activities that the U.S. is monitoring to inform its judgments and conclusions: weapons handling, air defense, ground forces, Navy, Air, Special Forces, and even Israel’s Nuclear Forces. But even then, only the weapons handling and special forces categories are identified as having a “medium” predictive ability in regards to determining Israel’s action; the rest are designated “low” predictive ability.

The second intelligence report is titled “Israel: Air Force Continues Preparations for Strike on Iran and Conducts a Second Large-Force Employment Exercise.” The document details Israeli  activities during an evident “mission rehearsal” (in U.S. lingo) that could be indicative of how Israel will  strike Iran. Citing imagery analysis and other sources, the NGA report notes that the Israeli Air Force is already conducting covert drone operations over Iran (evidently doing its own spying), and how, as part of Israeli Air Force activity, has been handling air-launched ballistic missiles and other weapons.

This is what intelligence is. It is clerical, it is a mosaic, it is complex. Jason Bourne it is not. It also provides insight of enormous public interest as we stand at the precipice of a broader conflict. It is information that directly bears upon U.S. obligations and actions. It is for that reason that I’ve decided to publish the basic documents. You can read through them below and decide for yourself what you think.

(I sent both documents to the Pentagon yesterday for comment, but neither the Office of the Secretary of Defense nor U.S. Central Command responded.) Sources tell me that they are authentic. 

— Edited by William M. Arkin