BREAKING: Iran Hacked Shin Bet Database, Exposed 2,000 Agency Veterans Censorship prohibited Israeli publication until foreign media reported story

א. איסור פרסום בישראל על פריצה (איראנית) למחשבי עמותת גמלאי השב”כ, וגניבת פרטיהם האישיים של אלפי יוצאי השירות
ב. ספר חדש רומז לפרשת “האסיר איקס 2”, החפרפרת של איראן בצמרת המוסד, שעדיין מוטל עליה איפול מוחלט בישראל

Amidst the worst Israeli intelligence failure of the past half century, the Hamas 10/7 attack, Intelligence Online reveals a further embarrassing incident.  It reported (paywall) six weeks ago that Iranian hackers penetrated the database of the Shin Bet veterans website, Shoval.  The personal data of 2,000 agency veterans was compromised, exposing their names, addresses, phone numbers, and identification numbers. This offers Iranian intelligence a rich trove of data of the most sensitive kind. It compromises the identity and safety of these operatives, many of whom work for cyber-security and technology firms hired by the Israeli government and foreign companies to protect their operations.

The Mossad maintains its own professional association, Agmon. Many of its members are worried they could be subject to a similar attack.

The IO story does not reveal when the hack began, when it was discovered, and how the hackers penetrated the site. Nor does it reveal what measures will be taken to protect the individuals whose identities were exposed.

The state prosecutor, at the behest of the Shin Bet, obtained a court gag order to suppress the story completely, until Yossi Melman and Haaretz filed an appeal of the directive:

Permission to report on the leak has been given in the wake of a petition to lift a gag order.  The petition was filed at the Tel Aviv Magistrate’s Court following reports on the topic in the foreign press [ed. a reference to IO], and Judge Oshri Frust-Frankel has ruled that the gag order be partially lifted.
[It] was issued at the request of officials entrusted with data protection after it emerged that they had failed at their task.

Frust-Frankel lifted some of the provisions of the gag order, permitting Melman to publish the bare minimum, which revealed some details, but omitted key elements of the story. Nevertheless, he played his hand as a journalist living under a censorship regime: the Shin Bet learned he was writing the story and obtained a gag order; someone (Melman?) leaked it to Intelligence Online; then Haaretz filed an appeal of the gag order to the judge; as evidence supporting lifting the gag, they pointed to the IO story. Masterfully played. Though in a sense, the cult of secrecy still won out by depriving Israelis of the full story.

Melman, in his story, criticized the prosecutor’s decision by including an interview with Avner Barnea, a former Shin Bet counter-espionage officer, which criticized the censor for suppressing an important report which the Israeli public should know and has a right to know.  He added that censorship is supposed to suppress information whose exposure would damage national security.  But in many cases, this being a prime example, the censor protects the intelligence agency from bad publicity and damage to its reputation among the Israeli public and political class.

As Barnea makes clear, transparency should be an overriding consideration, since it not only holds state bodies accountable for their operations, it also exerts pressure on them to adopt best practices in pursuit of their mission. Chief among them in this case, preserving and protecting the data of intelligence agencies, and hence the security of the nation:

“To the best of my understanding and experience in past operations…there are cases, certainly with the passage of time, in which the desire by government officials…to prohibit publication – stems mainly from the sense of shame to cover up their failures, and not from any truly relevant professional considerations.  Reports about leaks of information…improve information security…and sharpen the awareness of government agencies and the general public [regarding] the need to take greater care and protect their secrets.”

As readers of Tikun Olam know, piercing the veil of secrecy over Israeli national security and intelligence affairs is one of its most critical missions. Israel claims to be a democracy, but its massive censorship regime belies this. I’m holding up a mirror to this hypocrisy, demanding transparency and freedom of information and the press–all values upheld in any real democracy and denied in Israel.

A.A.: Iran’s double-agent in the Mossad

Two decades ago, a far more damaging scandal embroiled the Mossad. For years, there was a mole in its midst who fed an enemy nation compromising information.  But the Shin Bet, who maintains counter-intelligence operations for both itself and the Mossad, could not ferret the traitor out.  Then Yitzhak Ilan, who had been head of the Jewish terror unit, became the Shin Bet’s counter-espionage boss and chief of interrogations; better known as the spy-hunter.

A new book, The Interrogator (Ha’Choker), details how he caught the man I call Prisoner X2. The book notes that “thousands” of Mossad employees were given polygraph tests, none of the results of which offered a clue as to spy’s identity.  There were less than 7,000 such employees in 2004, which means the vast majority were tested.

After he was caught, A.A. was tried in secret and sentenced to 14 years. They placed him in a secret unit of an Israeli prison which had also housed Rabin’s assassin, Yigal Amir; and another secretly-detained Mossad agent, Ben Zygier, who hung himself in 2010.

I’ve written a series of posts about the Prisoner X2 case, which I’ve linked here.  In 2013, Amir Oren profiled the double agent.  While it was the most detailed account on the case published in Israel, Oren clearly self-censored material he knew the military censor would not permit.  Nevertheless, the censor prohibited it.  It remained on the Haaretz website for an hour. and was never published in the print edition. Luckily, I have a screenshot which I published. The Hebrew text is here as a Word document.  You can read my translation of the article at the end of this post here. These are a few excerpts:

“Tsilah,” a fictional name, isn’t in the habit of going to bed early. Yesterday at a late hour, she was grappling with the question of how to respond to a journalist’s inquiry–to speak or be silent. What to say if she does speak: whether it will help her husband or hurt him. Finally, after taking counsel with whoever she chose to consult, she chose to shut the door. She left things with the words: “I’m unable.” It’s prohibited, and not just for her, even to hint at what her husband did [for a living] and what he did before he did whatever distanced himself from her for years.

…The surprising turn in the plot is the fall from the heights of an exciting government mission into the deep well of a lonely guarded prison cell. From dangerous to endangered. From hero sailing around the world to an invisible man, whose world is as narrow as that of a cockroach in a jail, with an identity that isn’t even his.

When Haaretz published Oren’s story, I was able to consult one of my key Israeli sources, Binyamin Ben Eliezer (Fuad), who told me a great deal more. (Fuad died three years later and, before his death, released me from any confidentiality commitment.)  I wrote:

Oren intimated that the former Mossad agent’s initials were א.א. (Aleph Aleph). His report did not note that the agent had spied for Iran. If Oren knew this information, the censor certainly would never have permitted its publication. (My source offered that additional information and I am publishing it.) But the Haaretz journalist did note that א.א. was a senior agent and that he had done major damage to Israeli intelligence operations.

In fact, then-Shin Bet chief, Yuval Diskin said that A.A. had done as much harm to the spy agency as Marcus Klingberg, who was the most damaging double agent in Israel’s history.  But A.A. was not far behind.  In fact, when Bibi Netanyahu met one of the former’s defense attorneys, he told him AA should have been “executed.”

I wrote this in 2016 about the potential damage to Israel’s intelligence operations:

One of the reasons for the sensitivity of the case and for Netanyahu’s harsh statement, is that Prisoner X2 was the Mossad chief for Iran. As such, he was in a position to know all the intelligence gathered on Iran. He also would have known of any and all Iranian spies the Mossad had inside the country. He would have done enormous damage to Israel’s intelligence apparatus. However, nothing of this was ever reported. Thus, the Mossad avoided a tremendous black eye and the Israeli public was denied knowledge of a significant failure of its intelligence services.

I broke the story identifying the Shin Bet double agent, Boris Krasny, who caught Klingberg. The following day, a Globes reporter wrote that I had leaked Krasny identity. He didn’t name him or even link to my post. But the censor called his editor and demanded it be removed it. Within seven days of publication, Israel appealed to Google to ban searches on Krasny’s name, which the search platform did. Israel is a kingdom of secrets and lies, where democracy goes to die.

A.A. was released from prison in 2018.  Until publication of Ilan’s biography very little has been reported on him or his case.  It appears that we will not know his identity or how he compromised Israeli security and what secrets he conveyed to Iran for years to come, if ever.

Ilan, the mole-hunter, who was almost named chief of the Mossad until Sara Netanyahu derailed his candidacy, died of COVID. A few years before he did, he revealed another important story: the Shin Bet arrested current finance and settlements minister, Bezalel Smotrich, in 2006 with explosives in his vehicle. They were intended for a terror attack on Tel Aviv’s main highway, to protest the Gaza withdrawal.  Ilan arrested him and interrogated him for three weeks. Then was forced to let him go.

Uvda’s segment on Prisoner X2 censored

As a sidebar, Ilana Dayan, long-time host of Israel’s premier TV news magazine, Uvda, flew me to Washington DC and interviewed me over two days for a show she planned. Much of her questioning revolved around Prisoner X2, and I conveyed what I knew to her.  Before leaving, she told me she suspected this show would air soon. But it never did. Nor would her producer tell me why.  I presume that Dayan had to vet the material for the censor, who prohibited airing the segment.  But they wouldn’t even give me the satisfaction of an explanation. Needless, to say, the entire experience left a bad taste in my mouth.

Since 2004, when AA went to prison, the intelligence battle between Israel and Iran has ratcheted up.  Each country has infiltrated the computer networks of the other.  While Iran has been relatively unsuccessful in recruiting other spies in Israel, the latter appears to be more successful. Not only does it have the MeK terror cult as internal accomplices in assassinations, it also has other networks operating within the country.  The Iranian authorities regularly announce they’ve broken up another Mossad cell.  Then of course, there is the Stuxnet attack, in which Israel  and the US hacked  Iran’s nuclear facilities, leading to a massive sabotage of the uranium centrifuges at Natanz.