‘The boss is pleased’: Indictment suggests PM may have known of aide’s leak of intel
Netanyahu assistants referenced informing Netanyahu of some details of leaks, though degree to which this transpired is unclear in charge sheet
Jeremy Sharon is The Times of Israel’s legal affairs and settlements reporter
Details from an indictment filed on Thursday against the central suspect in the security documents scandal suggest that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may have been aware that members of his staff had leaked a classified document to the foreign press, in an ostensible bid to change public discourse on the issue of hostage negotiations with Hamas.
According to the indictment filed against Netanyahu’s aide Eli Feldstein on Thursday in the Central District Court, Feldstein was told by an aide that the prime minister was “pleased” after German tabloid newspaper Bild published the leaked document.
And in conversations between Feldstein and other aides before and after the leak, they discussed informing Netanyahu of various details, though the charge sheet did not make clear whether this transpired.
Netanyahu is not a suspect in the investigation. The indictment filed against Feldstein indicates that the unlawful removal of classified documents from the military intelligence database was the initiative of a reservist non-commissioned officer in the IDF, and that it was Feldstein who initiated efforts to leak one of those documents to the press.
The purpose of the leak, according to the indictment, was to influence media coverage and public discourse regarding hostage negotiations with Hamas, which had turned sharply against Netanyahu after the terror group’s murder of six hostages at the end of August.
The leak scandal erupted after Feldstein and the NCO were arrested on October 27, and details of the affair have slowly emerged in the three weeks during which the investigation has been conducted.
It appears from the indictment that the IDF and Shin Bet were chiefly troubled by the potential damage the leak could have caused to Israel’s intelligence gathering capabilities, by the exposure of the document and its source, and the possibility that this could negatively impact their ability to obtain highly valuable intelligence.
As detailed in the indictment against Feldstein, the sequence of events behind the unlawful removal of the documents and the leaking of one of them to the media unfolded over the course of six months, from April to September this year.
In April, the NCO in question, who was working in the intelligence security department of the IDF’s military intelligence directorate, saw raw intelligence from Hamas on hostage negotiation strategy (media reports have since indicated the document was not composed by Hamas leadership but rather lower-level staff, and it is thus unclear how reflective it is of the group’s overall strategy).
According to the indictment, the highly classified intelligence document was not passed on by the army since shortly after it was discovered, new information was secured which intelligence officials deemed to be “more relevant to the negotiations issue.”
The indictment says that revealing the original intelligence document could have caused real damage to Israel’s ability to collect intelligence information and exposed intelligence sources. This is the basis for the charges that Feldstein harmed state security.
On June 6, the NCO told Feldstein about the document in question via WhatsApp, and sought to have it passed on to Netanyahu, and on June 7, the NCO sent Feldstein a scan of the document via the Telegram messaging app.
Following the murder of the six hostages, Feldstein decided to leak the raw intelligence document to the press “to skew the public discourse on the issue of the hostages following the murder,” the indictment says.
On September 2, Feldstein leaked the document to Channel 12 reporter Raviv Golan, and told Netanyahu’s spokesperson Yonatan Urich in a WhatsApp message that he had done so, after sending it to the journalist.
“Don’t reply and don’t call me, what I’m building for you now for the weekend is worth a million dollars,” Feldstein wrote excitedly, adding “And [we] need the prime minister for this.”
But Golan sent the piece to the military censor for approval, and was told by the censor that it was totally forbidden to publish, due to both its content and the source of the information.
Not dissuaded, Feldstein then asked Urich if he had any contacts in the foreign press, in order to get the piece published by a foreign outlet that could not be blocked by Israel’s military censor.
Urich recommended speaking to an associate of his, Srulik Einhorn — a former campaign adviser to the Likud party — and Feldstein sent Einhorn the document on September 3 via WhatsApp. Einhorn sent it to a reporter at the German newspaper Bild on September 4, to circumvent the military censor.
Bild published its article on September 6 with direct quotes from the classified document.
After publication, Urich wrote to Feldstein, “The boss is pleased,” in an apparent reference to Netanyahu, who he had ostensibly updated on the publication of the story.
The indictment says that in the following days Feldstein sought to increase the story’s traction in Israeli media, but was met with skepticism by local reporters, as questions arose regarding the details in the Bild story. Feldstein allegedly contacted the NCO and requested that he provide him the hardcopy of the original classified document, so that he could offer it to reporters and prove the veracity of the information.
The indictment says Feldstein received the hardcopy from the NCO and two other classified documents on September 9. He then allegedly told another Netanyahu spokesperson, Ofer Golan, that “I’ve gathered everything” and “we need to bring it to the boss.”
He also then sent the classified hardcopy to several reporters, but they did not take action due to continued censorship limitations.
“Publication of the secret information in public, in media publications with broad reach, and the reverberations of the publication in the days and weeks afterwards, exposed to Hamas the intelligence capabilities of the State of Israel, which was likely to harm state security and the operational capabilities of the security services, and was likely to endanger lives particularly during wartime,” the indictment alleges in summation of the events.
Feldstein was indicted on charges of transferring classified information designed to harm state security, which carries with it a maximum sentence of life in prison.
The NCO was also indicted, but on a lesser charge of transferring classified information, which has a maximum sentence of seven years in prison.
Urich has been questioned by the police under caution, and may be the subject of an indictment, while other suspects are also likely to be indicted.
