America's closest ally has been classified as its highest espionage threat.

"The aggressiveness of Israeli intelligence collection on top Trump administration officials has been unhinged."

— Senior U.S. official, cited by The New York Times, June 6, 2026

The Pentagon quietly elevated Israel's counterintelligence threat level to "critical," the highest designation in the Defense Intelligence Agency's system. That means America's most reliable military partner now ranks above Russia and China on one of Washington's internal risk scales for espionage activity against U.S. officials. The assessment was not leaked by a whistleblower or uncovered through congressional oversight. It emerged when NBC News obtained an internal seven-page DIA document, followed by additional reporting from The New York Times that identified specific targets and methods.

The designation carries a simple message: whoever builds the weapons, trains the troops, and shares intelligence with Israel also needs to assume Israel is listening in on every conversation.

The DIA's assessment flagged three officials as particular targets of Israeli surveillance: Steve Witkoff, Trump's chief negotiator on Iran; Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon's top policy official; and Michael DiMino IV, Colby's deputy for Middle East affairs. These are not random selections. They are the people shaping Washington's approach to ending a war with Iran that Israel and the United States launched together on February 28, 2026.

American military personnel stationed in Israel reported discovering surveillance software surreptitiously installed on their phones. The New York Times noted that the DIA assessment found Israeli spying activity surged from late 2024 onward, coinciding with the Biden administration's pressure on Israel over Gaza, and continued accelerating after Trump took office.

The most striking detail is not what Israel was doing but how easily it could do it. Senior Trump officials routinely conducted national security business on personal cellphones, flew on private aircraft, and declined U.S. embassy staffing support abroad. A former senior official told the Times these habits made them "especially vulnerable targets."

Translation: the people responsible for America's most sensitive diplomatic negotiations carried their classified deliberations in their pockets.

The timing is not coincidental. Trump has been pushing for a diplomatic resolution with Iran since a ceasefire was reached in early April 2026. Netanyahu, by contrast, has publicly expressed skepticism that Iran would honor any negotiated deal and has pressed for resumed bombing raids. The two leaders clashed publicly last week when Trump called Netanyahu "crazy" during a phone call about Israel's continued bombardment of Lebanon, which has killed at least 3,500 people since the ceasefire.

Israel needs to know whether Trump is going to cut a deal that locks in diplomatic constraints on Israeli military freedom of action for years or decades. Andreas Kreig, a professor at King's College London, told Al Jazeera that from Israel's perspective, "the recent conflict with Iran was effectively a joint US-Israeli war, yet the United States is now in a position to shape the diplomatic endgame."

Israeli intelligence gathering serves a strategic purpose: identify opportunities to influence, derail, or undermine negotiations if Israeli leaders judge the process contrary to their security interests. Kreig put it bluntly. "While Israel sees the United States as its indispensable patron and closest strategic partner, it has simultaneously treated the US as a legitimate intelligence target whenever interests diverge."

Neither side is willing to acknowledge what everyone in Washington already knows. The White House dismissed the NBC report entirely. "This entire story is false and sourced to someone who doesn't have any knowledge of what's going on," a White House official said. The Israeli embassy called the allegations "completely false" and stated that Israel "does not gather intelligence on American entities, let alone U.S. government officials."

The Pentagon declined to comment. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees all U.S. intelligence agencies including the DIA, did not respond to requests for comment.

Emily Harding, vice president of the Defense and Security Department at CSIS, offered a less diplomatic assessment: Israel has "a hyper-aggressive intelligence service" that is "exceedingly interested in what we are up to." Current and former U.S. officials said American personnel already take extreme precautions when visiting Israel, including using burner phones and computers and exercising caution speaking in hotel rooms during official trips.

The denials from Washington and Jerusalem are routine. What is not routine is the internal Pentagon document that rates Israel's espionage threat higher than most adversaries.

This is not the first time Israeli espionage has caused a crisis in U.S.-Israel relations. In the 1980s, Jonathan Pollard, a U.S. Navy intelligence analyst, sold suitcases of top-secret documents to Israel and served 30 years in prison before being released on parole in 2015. The case remains one of the most significant espionage scandals in the history of the relationship.

But the current situation is structurally different from Pollard's solo operation. According to DIA assessments, Israeli intelligence agencies are conducting systematic surveillance at a level that has triggered the Pentagon's highest internal alert. Negar Mortazavi, an Iran expert, noted that Netanyahu's opposition to U.S.-Iran negotiations dates back to Obama's 2015 nuclear deal, which Netanyahu tried to sabotage "publicly and privately in any way he could."

The irony is visible from orbit: the United States provides billions in military aid to Israel, includes provisions for unprecedented integration of defense research and development in a pending NDAA, and has given diplomatic cover at the United Nations. Meanwhile, Israeli intelligence is conducting what the Pentagon's own analysts call "critical level" human espionage and technical collection against American officials.

The practical outcome is that U.S. officials will use extra caution when traveling to Israel or meeting with Israeli counterparts. Current and former officials said there did not appear to be any impact on the high-level intelligence sharing between the two countries, particularly regarding Iran. But trust is not measured in shared databases. It is measured in whether you feel comfortable speaking freely when your ally's people are in the room.

The question is not whether allies spy on each other. The U.S. eavesdropped on Angela Merkel's phone. Every intelligence service monitors its partners. The question is what happens when the spying becomes aggressive enough that your own defense department rates it as a critical threat, and the ally doing the spying is also the country you are depending on to fight alongside you in an active war.

America's closest partner has been classified as its most dangerous source of espionage. That is not a sign of a relationship working well. It is a sign that two countries with divergent interests are trying very hard to pretend they still share one.