Israeli espionage in the United States refers to clandestine intelligence-gathering and operations conducted by or on behalf of the State of Israel within the territory of the United States and/or against the government of the United States. Despite a close bilateral alliance, multiple incidents since Israel's foundation that Israeli intelligence agencies (such as Mossad, Shin Bet, Aman, and the now-defunct LAKAM) have actively collected American political, military, scientific, and economic secrets.
U.S. counterintelligence officials consistently rank Israeli espionage as among the most active on American soil, alongside larger countries such as France, China and Russia. In 1951, Mossad and the Central Intelligence Agency agreed not to spy on each other and US and Israeli services cooperated closely since then. Nevertheless, there were strong indications afterwards of ongoing Israeli espionage against the United States, confirmed by the 1985 arrest of Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, one of the most damaging security leaks in US history.
History
Early operations (1940s–1960s) Even before Israel's establishment, Zionist operatives in the U.S. ran clandestine networks to obtain arms and information. During the late 1940s, Haganah agents and sympathizers smuggled war material to Jewish forces in Palestine in defiance of U.S. embargoes. FBI investigations led to a few convictions, though most offenders avoided prison. These early operations laid the foundation for an Israeli intelligence presence in America: a secret "underground" coordinated by a small board including Israeli diplomats and a roving Israeli "troubleshooter." By the early 1950s, U.S. authorities suspected numerous instances of Americans (often Jewish-Americans sympathetic to Israel) passing classified information to Israeli contacts, though prosecutions were rare in those years.
In the 1950s, espionage frictions periodically surfaced. Notably, in 1954, a U.S. Army investigation accused Col. Chaim Herzog, Israel's military attaché in Washington (and future Israeli president), of attempting to recruit a Jordanian embassy guard to spy for Israel. The FBI also found that Israeli intelligence had cultivated sources inside the U.S. government: one State Department officer was caught sharing information and was quietly pushed out of service amid allegations of aiding Israeli agents. Around the same period, U.S. officials discovered Israeli eavesdropping devices in the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv and thwarted an Israeli Shin Bet attempt to blackmail an Arab-American employee of the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem. In the infamous 1954 Lavon Affair, Israeli agents in Egypt (without U.S. knowledge) bombed American and British cultural facilities in a bungled covert operation, straining Israel's relations with Washington.
By the mid-1950s, concerned about spiraling counterespionage, CIA leadership sought an understanding with Israel to curb mutual spying. James Jesus Angleton, the CIA's chief of counterintelligence, had served as the CIA's liaison to Israel from 1951 onward and was instrumental in establishing a secret intelligence-sharing pact. Under this unofficial détente, the CIA agreed not to target Israel, and Israel ostensibly pledged likewise. Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman later asserted that Israel decided "a long time ago not to spy on the U.S." In practice, however, Israeli espionage in the U.S. did not cease; it merely became more circumspect for a time. U.S. counterintelligence officials continued to view Israel as a friendly service – one whose activities were often downplayed or handled quietly to avoid political fallout.
Scientific and nuclear espionage (1960s–1970s) Israel's drive to secure a technological edge – particularly its secret nuclear weapons program – led to intensified espionage in the 1960s. In 1960, Israel's Ministry of Defense created the Scientific Liaison Bureau (abbreviated LAKAM in Hebrew) specifically to acquire scientific and technical information from abroad, especially from the United States. A CIA report from the era noted LAKAM gave "top priority" to collecting U.S. scientific intelligence. During the Cold War, U.S. security officials privately ranked Israel as "the second most active" intelligence service on American soil (surpassed only by the Soviet Union). Israel's focus was on obtaining military technology and dual-use items that it could not readily buy, often using covert methods and front companies. Another priority was the surveillance of Arab-American and Palestinian activists in the US, with the Israelis allegedly cooperating with the CIA and the FBI.
One of the most consequential suspicions of this era is the NUMEC affair (sometimes called the Apollo affair). In the mid-1960s, more than 200 pounds of weapons-grade highly enriched uranium went missing from a nuclear fuel plant operated by the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC) in Apollo, Pennsylvania. Circumstantial evidence led U.S. intelligence to suspect an Israeli operation: NUMEC's president, Zalman Shapiro, was a Zionist leader with close ties to Israeli officials. According to a former CIA station chief in Tel Aviv, the NUMEC plant was "an Israeli operation from the beginning," allegedly funneling nuclear material to Israel's nascent atomic weapons project. Declassified reviews have been inconclusive – a secret 1978 GAO report (only released decades later) found no "substantive proof" due to CIA and FBI refusals to share all evidence. Nonetheless, the GAO acknowledged "circumstantial information" pointing to diversion, and later expert studies by former U.S. nuclear regulators concluded the missing uranium "ended up in Israel" for its first nuclear bombs. The NUMEC case remains officially unresolved, buried by successive U.S. administrations for its political sensitivity, but it is widely believed that Israeli agents (possibly with Shapiro's help) spirited the material to Dimona in the 1960s.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Israel used clandestine networks to obtain other critical U.S. technology. During this period, Arnon Milchan, later a famous Hollywood film producer, served as an important Israeli agent. Recruited in the 1960s by LAKAM, Milchan eventually operated some 30 front companies across 17 countries to acquire sensitive technology and materiel for Israel. He worked under LAKAM spymasters like Benjamin Blumberg and Rafi Eitan (the latter would later run the Pollard spy ring). One of Milchan's key operations involved procurement of krytrons – high-speed electronic switches that can be used as triggers for nuclear bombs. Between 1979 and 1983, Milchan's brokerage firm, Heli Trading Co., helped arrange the illegal export of 800 krytrons from a California company (Milco) to Israel's Ministry of Defense. U.S. authorities eventually indicted the owner of MILCO, Richard Kelly Smyth, on dozens of counts of smuggling these devices without export licenses. Smyth fled the country in 1985 after being released on bail and resurfaced in Israel, effectively escaping U.S. justice. An FBI investigation later revealed that Milchan had orchestrated the krytron procurement scheme (code-named "Project Pinto") and that a young Benjamin Netanyahu (then an Israeli diplomat) was involved in the logistics at Heli Trading. Milchan himself publicly admitted in 2013 that he spent years as an undercover operative purchasing technology for Israel's nuclear program.
The Pollard Affair and 1980s spy scandals Israeli espionage reached a high-profile peak in the mid-1980s, shattering assumptions that the allies "do not spy on each other". In 1985, U.S. Navy intelligence analyst Jonathan Jay Pollard was arrested for spying on the United States on behalf of Israel – the most damaging public Israeli espionage case in the US to date. Pollard had begun handing over classified documents to an Israeli officer in June 1984, motivated by a mix of ideological conviction (he claimed the U.S. was withholding vital intelligence from Israel) and financial reward. Over 18 months, Pollard provided Israel with an astonishing volume of U.S. secrets – so much that the full inventory remains classified. By his own admission, he made biweekly "drops" of documents in Washington, which were photocopied at a safe-house and returned. He ultimately passed an estimated 800+ highly classified documents and over 1,500 signal intelligence summaries to Israel. These included U.S. intelligence on Arab and Soviet military capabilities (e.g. Syrian air defenses, the Iraqi nuclear program, PLO headquarters locations, Soviet arms shipments) and even a U.S. assessment of Israel's own military strength. Notably, Pollard's handlers from LAKAM primarily sought data on Middle Eastern adversaries, not U.S. secrets per se.
Regardless of Israel's targeting intentions, Pollard's espionage seriously compromised U.S. security. U.S. officials also feared some of Pollard's trove might be traded by Israel to the Soviet Union – a concern fueled by known Soviet penetrations of allied intelligence during the Cold War. He divulged extremely sensitive sources and methods; then-Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger asserted that "It is difficult for me, even in the so-called 'year of the spy,' to conceive of a greater harm to national security." Pollard was arrested in November 1985 after his activities raised suspicions, and he was caught trying to seek asylum at the Israeli embassy in Washington. The scandal gravely embarrassed Israel. It initially claimed Pollard was part of a "rogue" operation, not approved by top leadership – a characterization widely doubted by investigators. In 1987, Pollard pleaded guilty and received a life sentence, the first American ever to be jailed for life for spying on a U.S. ally. He served 30 years in prison before being paroled in 2015; upon his parole's expiry, Pollard emigrated to Israel in 2020, where he was welcomed and personally thanked by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Concurrent with Pollard, other Israeli spy intrigues of the 1980s came to light. For instance, in 1986 U.S. authorities exposed the Inslaw affair, a convoluted saga involving stolen software and alleged Israeli involvement. Inslaw Inc., a small Washington DC software firm, accused the US Department of Justice of illegally seizing its case-management program PROMIS and distributing it to foreign intelligence agencies. According to a 1992 House Judiciary Committee report, officials in DOJ conspired to steal PROMIS and funnel it via cutouts to allies and possibly adversaries. One key figure was alleged to be Rafi Eitan (the same LAKAM spymaster who ran Pollard). In 1983, Eitan (using the alias "Dr. Ben Orr") was given a demonstration of PROMIS at Inslaw's office and left with a copy of the software. Inslaw's owner later identified the visiting "Dr. Orr" as Eitan, then Israel's anti-terror intelligence chief. Investigators believe the stolen PROMIS was enhanced by Israel to function as a Trojan horse: Israeli engineers reportedly inserted a secret backdoor that allowed Mossad to surreptitiously extract data from any organization that installed the software.