A-G said mulling probe of Barak for leaked Iran tapes

Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein is considering a criminal investigation into former defense minister Ehud Barak for revealing sensitive information in recently leaked recordings that detail Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to win support for attacking Iran, Haaretz reported Tuesday.

Weinstein is consulting with senior members of the state prosecution and police officials over whether the recordings leaked to the media last week were in violation of Israeli laws on disclosure, Haaretz said.

Channel 2 television on Friday aired a recording in which Barak said Israel considered attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities on three separate occasions between 2010 and 2012, but each time the plan was disregarded for varying reasons.

Clause 117 of Israel’s Penal Code prohibits public servants from divulging sensitive state information to unauthorized persons, and is punishable by up to three years in prison.

Weinstein was said be consulting with the chief military censor, Brigadier General Sima Vaknin-Gil, even though the censor’s office cleared the recordings for publication.

In the recordings, Barak can be heard telling biographers Ilan Kfir and Danny Dor that he and Netanyahu wanted to attack Iran in 2010, but that then-IDF chief of staff Gabi Ashkenazi indicated that there was no viable plan for such an operation; in 2011, the plan was thwarted by fellow ministers Moshe Ya’alon and Yuval Steinitz; a planned 2012 strike was aborted because it happened to coincide with a joint Israel-US military exercise and Israel did not want to drag the US into the fray.

In a recording released Monday, the former defense minister also accused Netanyahu of being “childish to an embarrassing degree” in his conduct surrounding the 2011 Gilad Shalit prisoner release — a deal Barak said Netanyahu initially opposed, and later took full credit for.

Barak said he pushed the hesitant prime minister to go ahead with the controversial prisoner release, and then to enact legislation that would limit future swaps. Netanyahu was later more concerned about the publicity opportunities the newly released Shalit presented than “the deed,” he charged.

Israel’s leadership, from Netanyahu down, has reacted furiously to the revelations, with former foreign minister Avigdor Liberman calling them a unnecessary exposition of state secrets and Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairman Tzachi Hanegbi lashing out at the censor for allowing their publication.

Channel 2 said that “anger” at the former defense minister’s statements was widespread among the Israeli leadership, and that numerous senior political and security officials were also privately intimating that Barak’s version of events was not entirely accurate.

Barak said he preferred the transcripts not be released, but Kfir and Dor released the interviews to the media in a dispute over the rights to the English language version of his upcoming biography “Wars of My Life.”

The authors said they decided to leak the recording after Barak backtracked on a pledge to give them the rights to the English-language version of the book, and signed with an American publisher instead.

Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.