Our nation’s capital enjoys certain national security subjects that shouldn’t be mentioned in polite society. Bringing them up won’t get you invited back to Georgetown salons. But very few of these subjects are more controversial than that of Israeli espionage against the United States.
This forbidden topic burst forth on Monday with the publication of a story at Drop Site News by Ryan Grim and Saagar Enjeti. It focused on a new appointment to President Donald Trump’s National Security Council. Specifically, that under the leadership of scandal-plagued Mike Waltz, the NSC has hired a new director for Israel and Iran: Merav Ceren.
Ceren was previously affiliated with the Israeli Ministry of Defense. Drop Site News suggests that her “appointment gives Israel an unusual advantage in internal policy discussions just as the Israeli government has launched a new campaign to pressure the American government to start a war with Iran rather than continue with negotiations toward a nuclear deal.” The NSC admitted that Ceren is employed there, while insisting that she is “a patriotic American.”
What exactly was Ceren doing for IMOD?
Her online bio lists previous employment as a House and Senate staffer. Her brother, Omri Ceren, is an important Senate staffer, serving as legislative director for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), where he’s known for his strongly pro-Israel positions. After the Drop Site News story landed, Merav Ceren’s social media defenders quickly explained that her past service to IMOD barely existed. They insisted that her post-college fellowship in Israel was about helping people, including natural resource management in the occupied territories.
Ceren has also been affiliated with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington think tank that openly promotes its support for Israeli interests. Ceren’s 2016 Foundation for Defense of Democracies bio explained that “she worked at Israel’s Ministry of Defense, where she participated in negotiations in the West Bank between Israel’s Coordinator for Government Activities in the Territories and Palestinian Authority officials.”
That sounds like something more than a summer internship.
Regardless of the truth here, Ceren’s big new NSC job generated controversy because discussing Israeli espionage and influence isn’t something polite people inside the Beltway do. American counterintelligence is fully aware that Israel spies on the U.S., including inside this country, sometimes aggressively. In truth, Israel represents a major espionage threat to the U.S., which constitutes an anomaly because Israel is also our close ally and a close intelligence partner.
The truth?
Almost everybody spies on each other. An exception is the Anglosphere espionage alliance termed Five Eyes, dating to the Second World War, where members truly don’t spy on each other in any serious way. Beyond that, however, friends and allies certainly spy on each other. The details involve the intensity and seriousness of the espionage.
Here, Israel is different. Our intelligence community has a close relationship with French intelligence agencies, but that doesn’t stop Paris from spying on us, usually somewhat carefully. But if a French spy operation gets outed, Paris generally keeps mum. In contrast, if Israeli spying on the U.S. goes public, as happens every few years, Israel’s public defenders waste no time smearing anyone who discusses the case in detail, often with unsubtle hints that merely mentioning the subject betrays anti-Semitism.
America’s espionage relationship with Israel is vexingly complex. Our National Security Agency enjoys a close and mutually beneficial signals intelligence partnership with its Israeli counterpart, Unit 8200 of the Israel Defense Forces, one of the world’s best SIGINT outfits. At the same time, other Israeli intelligence offices spy on Americans, even in this country, sometimes in an aggressive manner matched only by Russian and Chinese spies. Israeli spies are similarly unconcerned about getting caught. They know their friends in American politics and media will help them make any spy scandal disappear without too much fuss.
During my IC career, I partnered with Israeli intelligence and found them competent professionals. I also worked in counterintelligence, which gave me insights into how Israel spies on us with surprising effectiveness. Anyone not reflecting the complexity of the U.S.-Israel security relationship is omitting something important from this mostly opaque story.
To be clear, there’s nothing in Merav Ceren’s public biography to indicate that she’s any sort of Israeli spy. But simply asking about her ties to Israel, given her past affiliation with IMOD, is a perfectly legitimate counterintelligence inquiry, given her powerful and sensitive new job.
Democrats have no grounds to castigate the Trump administration. Former President Joe Biden’s White House was riddled with dubious characters, mostly former President Barack Obama retreads, who didn’t belong in the sensitive jobs they held. Multiple senior staffers possessed questionable ties to Iran and may even have been Iranian agents, while Biden’s NSC intelligence director was a Palestinian activist and terrorism apologist. Nevertheless, vetting NSC hires better than Obama and Biden did is a low bar for Team Trump to clear, and they seem not to be achieving that.
TRUMP IS RIGHT: HOUSING ISN’T HEALTHCARE
The bigger question for the White House involves the wisdom of appointing an Israeli partisan to the sensitive post of managing Israel and Iran issues on the NSC.
Unless the Trump administration’s policy is designed to center on doing whatever Israel wants, such jobs should be held by less biased personnel. Biden skewed America’s relationship with Tehran in Iran’s favor; Trump is simply skewing it Israel’s way. Obviously, Israel is much preferable to Iran. However, if Trump is serious about getting the “deal” with the mullahs in Tehran that he insists he wants, his key staffers handling it shouldn’t be obviously biased in favor of any of the foreign participants.
John R. Schindler served with the NSA as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.
