President Obama warned back in January 2014, that while his administration would try to curb espionage activities against “close friends and allies,” the U.S. in some instances would have no choice but to do it anyway.
Nearly two years later, it was revealed in a Wall Street Journal report that Obama decided spying on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was warranted because of Netanyahu’s effort to build opposition to the Iran nuclear deal.
According to that report, Obama decided that there was a “compelling national security purpose” to monitoring Netanyahu. And as it turns out, Obama said publicly in 2014 that these kind of exceptions would happen from time to time.
“Our capabilities help protect not only our nation, but our friends and our allies, as well,” he said in Washington, D.C., in 2014, addressing complaints that the U.S. was spying on allies. “But our efforts will only be effective if ordinary citizens in other countries have confidence that the United States respects their privacy, too.”
“And the leaders of our close friends and allies deserve to know that if I want to know what they think about an issue, I’ll pick up the phone and call them, rather than turning to surveillance,” he said.
But still, Obama added an important qualifier:
“Given the understandable attention that this issue has received, I have made clear to the intelligence community that unless there is a compelling national security purpose, we will not monitor the communications of heads of state and government of our close friends and allies,” he said.
Obama also said that just like any other nation, the U.S. is looking to enhance its national security, and will use its intelligence infrastructure to achieve that aim when needed. He said the U.S. can’t be blamed for having a more effective system in place than others.
“We will not apologize simply because our services may be more effective,” he said.
According to the Journal’s report, the White House believed it was important to monitor Netanyahu in order to fight his efforts to lobby against the Iran nuclear agreement.
The monitoring effort essentially revealed that Israel has its own spying operation that was able to ferret out the details of the Iran deal, and that Israel was working with Jewish-American groups to fight the deal.
