US government employee charged with leaking Israel’s plans to attack Iran’

Asif William Rahman was arrested by the FBI this week in Cambodia, according to reports. Rahman is to appear in court on the island of Guam

An employee of the CIA has been charged with leaking Israel’s plans to attack Iran.
Asif William Rahman was arrested by the FBI this week in Cambodia, The New York Times reports, with court documents showing he had top-secret security clearance.
Rahman is to appear in court on the island of Guam on Thursday
A federal investigation was launched in October into the alleged leak of two intelligence documents which detailed Israel’s preparations to attack Iran.
Last month, Israel struck a number of Iranian military sites, including missile production facilities, in response to an earlier Iranian barrage aimed at Israeli air bases.
The documents pertaining to last month’s investigation, which were seen by The Telegraph, include interpretations of satellite imagery that appear to have been prepared recently by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and analyse information gathered by US spy satellites and the National Security Agency.
They were marked “top secret”, dated Oct 15 and 16 and were circulated last month on the Telegram messaging app.
Analysts said the documents could have been leaked to delay or disrupt Israel’s retaliation.
One document said that Israel was continuing to prepare munitions and covert drone activity, while the other outlined Israeli Air Force exercises involving ballistic and air-to-surface missiles.
Both of the documents said the activities were believed to be in preparation for a strike on Iran.
“We cannot definitively predict the scale and scope of a strike on Iran and such a strike can occur with no further GEOINT warning,” one document cautions.
GEOINT is a military acronym for geospatial intelligence, which mostly relies on satellite images but can also include signal intercepts.
The document adds: “We have not observed indications that Israel intends to use a nuclear weapon,” saying a recent dispersal of Israel’s Jericho II medium-range ballistic missiles, which are believed to have been built as nuclear delivery systems, was probably defensive.
The United States does not publicly acknowledge the existence of Israel’s nuclear arsenal, which Israel itself has never admitted to.
The second document described two large Israeli air force exercises including refuelling aircraft and an early warning aircraft.
The Telegram channel accused at first of leaking the documents said the documents initially appeared in a separate private group with 7,000 members.
“We also reiterate that we have no connection to the original source, which we assume to be a whistleblower within the US Department of Defence,” the statement said. In a separate statement, the Telegram group said an acquaintance had received the documents through an anonymous source.
The group claims to be run by independent journalists and that it is not “Iran-affiliated”, but it refers to the Israeli government as the “Zionist regime” and uses Tehran time as a baseline.