I am the Director of Allied Threat Liaison at the Pentagon.
M job is to hold two facts in my hands at the same time, every day, forever, and never let them touch.
Fact one: we tell Israel everything.
Fact two: this week the Defense Intelligence Agency rated Israel a critical espionage threat, the same category we use for Russia, for trying to learn the things we are already telling them.
I keep both facts true. The entire position, in one sentence. I have a corner office for it.
Every morning I send Mossad's liaison a briefing so complete it could be a confession. Troop movements. Our negotiating floor on Iran. The thing the Undersecretary said in the room he thought was quiet. I attach it. I hit send. And then, by 11, I file a counterintelligence report warning that Israel is aggressively attempting to obtain the exact document I emailed their station chief with a read receipt at 9:04.
People ask how Israel could possibly be spying on us when we hand them the material voluntarily. I want to be honest with you. It is not a contradiction. It is the product. If they only knew what we gave them, the relationship would be a friendship, and friendships do not have a budget line. The spying is what makes it a relationship. The spying is what gets renewed.
I have a filing cabinet. In the top drawer is Jonathan Pollard, 1985, a Navy analyst who handed Israel a room full of our secrets. Below him is Israel's formal apology, 1987, beautiful, "never again," signed. I have read it forty times. Below that is the 1995 memo where the Pentagon called Israel a non-traditional adversary and then swore it never wrote that down. Below that is this week, where the DIA made Israel a critical threat and three days later we approved the next aid package, and I filed the approval one drawer down from the apology, and the drawers do not know about each other. I make sure the drawers do not know about each other. Also the job.
There was an agreement in 1951. The CIA and Mossad shook hands. We would not spy on them. They would not spy on us. I keep the original in a frame. It is the funniest object I own. I show it to new hires and I watch their faces and I know within four seconds whether they will last.
The ones who say "but this is insane" do not last. The ones who say "so who at the embassy do I email the briefing to" get the corner office.
Here is what I have learned in twenty years of holding two facts apart with my bare hands. Washington does not want the contradiction solved. A solved contradiction is a closed file. A closed file is a smaller agency. Nobody in this building has ever been promoted for ending something.
So I send Mossad the briefing. I file the warning on Israel. I rate the ally a critical threat. I approve the aid. I accept the apology I have already filed forty times, and I slide it into the drawer above the renewal, and I keep the two facts from ever touching, because the day they touch is the day I find out which one was real, and I have built an entire life, a pension, a parking spot, on never finding out.
Israel is our closest ally.
Israel is our highest threat.
Both checks cleared.
You were never paying for security. You were paying me to keep the drawers from knowing about each other.
And the cabinet is full now.
So we are buying a bigger cabinet.