The Defense Intelligence Agency has quietly done something it has never done to a close ally: it raised Israel’s counterintelligence threat level to “critical,” the highest designation in its internal assessment system — the same tier the U.S. military reserves for hostile intelligence services like those of China, Russia, and Iran. The reclassification, first reported by NBC News and the New York Times on June 6, 2026, was driven by a string of incidents in which U.S. defense personnel working in Israel discovered software designed to intercept their communications had been surreptitiously installed on their personal smartphones.

One senior official, describing the scale of Israeli collection against the United States to reporters, called it “unhinged.” It is an extraordinary word to attach to a country that is, on paper, one of America’s two or three closest military partners. And it lands in the middle of the most public rupture between a sitting U.S. president and an Israeli prime minister in living memory.

What the assessment actually says

According to officials briefed on it, the DIA circulated a seven-page document, complete with a chart, concluding that Israel’s capacity for human espionage and technical collection against the United States had reached a “critical” level. The phrase is not rhetorical. Inside the Pentagon’s counterintelligence framework, threat levels run from low through high to critical, and “critical” is the ceiling — the bucket that triggers the most aggressive defensive countermeasures and the assumption that any device, room, or conversation in-country may be compromised.

The reporting names three U.S. officials as priority targets of the Israeli effort:

  • Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s top envoy and lead negotiator on the Iran file
  • Elbridge A. Colby, the Pentagon’s top policy official
  • Michael P. DiMino IV, one of Colby’s deputies

The common thread is obvious: all three sit at the center of the Trump administration’s internal deliberations on Iran — exactly the decision-making Israel has the strongest incentive to read in real time, and the strongest incentive to influence.

The phones

The detail that turned a long-simmering concern into a formal “critical” rating was physical and specific: U.S. personnel deployed in Israel found that interception software had been planted on their devices to tap their communications. This is not a story about a phishing email or a misconfigured server. It is a story about hands-on, in-country implantation against the phones of visiting American officials — the kind of access that commercial spyware vendors have spent the last decade industrializing.

The response has been a quiet but telling change in tradecraft. According to current and former officials, American delegations traveling to Israel now use burner phones and burner laptops, follow strict communication protocols, and are “extremely cautious while speaking in hotel rooms.” When U.S. negotiators start treating an ally’s territory the way they’d treat Beijing or Moscow — temporary devices, no sensitive conversations indoors, assume the room is wired — the relationship has already changed, whatever the official talking points say.

Israel’s government rejects all of it. A spokesperson for the Israeli Embassy in Washington called the allegations “completely false,” insisting that “Israel does not gather intelligence on American entities, let alone U.S. government officials.” That denial sits uneasily against the documented history below.

This is not new — it is escalation

Israeli intelligence collection against the United States is one of the worst-kept secrets in the counterintelligence community. The reference point everyone reaches for is Jonathan Pollard, the U.S. naval intelligence analyst arrested in 1985 for passing a reported truckload of classified documents to Israel; he served 30 years before his 2015 parole, and his case remains the defining espionage scandal of the U.S.–Israel relationship.

But the more relevant lineage runs through the last decade of commercial spyware. Israel is the global epicenter of the offensive cyber industry — the home of NSO Group’s Pegasus, of Paragon’s Graphite, and of the broader ecosystem of zero-click mobile implants that governments around the world have used to surveil journalists, dissidents, and rival officials. We’ve documented that ecosystem repeatedly: the Predatorgate verdict that finally put Intellexa’s founder in legal jeopardy, the massive Intellexa leak exposing ad-based zero-click delivery and vendor backdoors, and the broader cyber arms trade reshaping the balance of power between states and the people they want to watch. The same nation-state customer base that buys those tools is more than capable of pointing them at a visiting negotiator’s iPhone — a threat made cheaper still by the kind of long-lived mobile vulnerabilities we covered in The Forever Day.

The friction has been building on the corporate side too. In 2025, Microsoft terminated an Israeli military unit’s access to its cloud after revelations of a mass-surveillance system, and reporting surfaced an alleged “winking mechanism” by which U.S. cloud giants quietly signaled Israel about sensitive data requests. The DIA’s “critical” designation is the intelligence community formalizing, in its own language, a pattern that the tech-ethics world has been circling for two years.

Why now: the Iran rift

Counterintelligence ratings don’t move in a vacuum. This one moved because U.S. and Israeli interests on Iran have stopped overlapping and started diverging — and both sides know it.

Earlier this year, Washington and Jerusalem ran joint military operations against Iran; the broader campaign and its digital dimensions are mapped in our analysis of the 2026 Iran–Israel–U.S. cyber conflict and the earlier cyber proxy war fought through hacktivist coalitions. After the ceasefire, the two governments split on what comes next. Trump wants a diplomatic framework — a deal that ends the shooting and, in Tehran’s reading, locks in a status quo. Netanyahu wants sustained military pressure, doubting Iran will honor any agreement and fearing that a U.S.–Iran deal would permanently constrain Israel’s freedom to strike. From Israel’s standpoint, knowing exactly where Witkoff and Colby will land before they land there is worth almost any risk. That is the motive the DIA is pointing at.

The rift is no longer subtext. In a phone call in early June, Trump reportedly told Netanyahu, “You’re fucking crazy,” berated him over an Israeli plan to strike Beirut, and warned that the escalation was threatening to blow up his Iran negotiations. Netanyahu aborted the Beirut operation; Trump announced a new ceasefire. When the president of the United States is yelling profanities at the Israeli prime minister over an open line — a line both of them now have reason to assume someone else is listening to — the spyware story and the diplomatic story are the same story.

The trust problem cuts both ways

It’s worth sitting with how unusual “critical” is. The U.S. and Israel share signals intelligence, run joint exercises, and integrate at the operational level through CENTCOM. Rating an ally’s collection capability at the ceiling of the threat scale means the working assumption inside parts of the Pentagon is now that Israel is treating the United States, on the Iran question, as an intelligence target rather than a partner — and that planned deepening of U.S.–Israeli military integration may have to be rebuilt around that assumption.

The politics make the counterintelligence picture thornier still. The depth of the institutional alignment between Washington and Jerusalem has been visible in unmistakable ways — back in October 2023, Rep. Brian Mast, a U.S. Army veteran who also volunteered with the IDF, wore an Israeli military uniform onto the floor of Capitol Hill in a gesture of solidarity (video). When a relationship is that entangled — when allegiances are worn literally on the sleeve — a formal finding that the ally is bugging your negotiators’ phones forces a set of questions Washington has spent decades declining to ask out loud.

For now, the DIA has asked one of them. The answer it reached — critical — is the most candid thing the U.S. national security apparatus has said about Israeli espionage in a generation, and the burner phones in every American delegation’s pocket suggest the people closest to the problem already believe it.

Sources