Throwing money at spy agencies


May 5, 2017
Sarah Benton

Articles from 1) Richard Silverstein, 2) Chaim Levinson.


Shabak chief, Nadav Argaman (at microphone) and Mossad chief, Yossi Cohen (in white shirt) at Israeli memorial day ceremony earlier this week

Israeli Intelligence Budget Nearly Doubles in Past Decade Under Netanyahu

By Richard Silverstein, Tikun Olam
May 05, 2017

Haaretz reports Israel’s two main intelligence agencies have nearly doubled their budgets in the past twelve years. Both the Mossad and Shabak had budgets of $1.3-billion in 2005. The upcoming budget for 2018 is slated to rise to $2.2-billion. It’s no accident that much of the dramatic rise in budgetary expenditures happened during Bibi Netanyahu’s prime ministership (2009-present). Bibi himself served in the élite Sayeret Matkal commando unit whose missions often involved intelligence components. It’s widely rumoured that after he left the IDF he served as a Mossad agent (and perhaps served either the FBI or CIA as well) in the early 1980s before he entered politics.


Ad promoting Mossad’s new cyber-warfare unit

There will be a 10% budget increase from the year to 2017 to 2018 alone. Though the government budget doesn’t distinguish between the budgets of the two agencies, the Shabak’s is bigger, as is its overall workforce. Retiree pensions also additionally amount to $250-million per year.

Compare these figures with the U.S. national intelligence program (excluding military intelligence) budgeted at $53-billion for 2016. The population of this country is about 50 times bigger than that of Israel. If our intelligence spending tracked that of Israel, our comparable budget would be $100-billion. This allows one to see what an outsized, even distorted budgetary item this is in the context of Israel’s government spending. It further reinforces my long-time contention that Israel is a national security state. A country with an army, cyber-warriors, spooks, and secret police, and for which its civilian population is sometimes little more than an afterthought.

The Haaretz figures do not include the budget for other intelligence units of the IDF like AMAN, which is quite substantial.

The majority of the increase in spending is targeted toward launching cyber-security capabilities for Mossad (though I’ve written about new cyber-warfare units launched by both agencies). In hiring to fill these new positions, government intelligence agencies are competing with the generous pay packages candidates earn from high-tech employers.

As with many government agencies which become the hot, new thing (cf. NSA and Department of Homeland Security after 9/11)–money is thrown at a problem, and not always in the most careful fashion. Along with this, as Haaretz notes, there is a great deal of overlap between the two agencies. They are each taking on some tasks the other is already handling, making for redundancy and wastage. Because each functions largely in the shadows no one is reviewing the larger picture to ensure the funds are well-spent and not duplicative.


idf-cyber-hq-2016
Israel’s new [2016] underground cyber warfare unit.

Funding for Shin Bet and Mossad Doubled in 12 Years to $2.4 Billion

Most of the growth in funding for the two intelligence entities has been directed to technology personnel

By Chaim Levinson, Haaretz premium
May 05, 2017

The annual combined budget for Israel’s Shin Bet security service and the Mossad espionage agency will be 8.6 billion shekels ($2.4 billion) in 2018, double what the two intelligence entities received 12 years ago and 10 percent more than this year’s budget of 7.8 billion shekels. In 2016, the combined funding for the two agencies was 7.5 billion shekels.

Yossi Cohen enjoys Netanyahu’s complete trust, allowing him to expand the Mossad’s operations

The Finance Ministry does not publish separate budgets for the Shin Bet and Mossad, but the Shin Bet is the larger agency, as is its budget. The budget figures, which have grown considerably since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took office in 2009, don’t include the cost of pensions for staff who have retired from the two agencies, which amounts to approximately a billion shekels a year.

Sources who asked to remain anonymous told Haaretz that a considerable portion of the increased funding has been for the Mossad. The current head of the agency, Yossi Cohen, enjoys Netanyahu’s complete trust, allowing him to expand the Mossad’s operations. The sources noted that there are visible signs of the physical expansion of the Mossad headquarters north of Tel Aviv to accommodate new staff. One senior official told Haaretz that intelligence operations now require more resources than before, adding that the payback on the investment greatly outweighs what is spent.

Most of the growth in personnel at the two agencies has been for staff dealing with technology. The Shin Bet and Mossad have to compete for staff with major civilian high-tech companies, and offer them high salaries. Sources also acknowledge that there might be major duplication in the technology related work of the Israeli army, the Shin Bet and the Mossad. That’s because the agencies work separately under a veil of secrecy and there is no entity coordinating their activities with an eye to combining operations.

Job postings for the Shin Bet and Mossad on the internet reflect the recruiting efforts that they are making to find cyber-technology experts. The Shin Bet has just launched a staff recruitment drive in the field, while the Mossad postings state, for example, that it is looking for a cyber-related development engineer, for someone with responsibility for defensive cyber-infrastructure and for college students to work in cyber-related operations. The agencies also compete with one another on cellular technology.

Intelligence agencies in Western countries are in a race to crack the encoding of a range of technology, including smartphones. At a Congressional hearing in the United States this week, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigations, James Comey, noted that his agency had not managed to break into 46 percent of the electronic devices that it had seized.

Over the years, the Israeli government has hidden the Mossad and Shin Bet budgets from the public. At the beginning of this year, the budget was included in the “general reserve” budget line, with a request submitted later to the Knesset Finance Committee to transfer it to the two intelligence agencies. In the past, their spending was included in the defence budget, even though the agencies report directly to the Prime Minister’s Office. There was criticism over putting the amounts in the defence budget, which was inflated in the process.

In wrangling over the defence budget in the prior Netanyahu government that was in office before the 2015 election, the finance minister at the time, Yair Lapid, and the Defence Ministry director general then, Dan Harel, agreed to remove Shin Bet and Mossad funding from the defence budget. It has since been designated at the Finance Ministry separately as “Code 31.” In the budget for 2017 and 2018, funding for the intelligence agencies is more easily identifiable as “various defence costs.”

While the intelligence agency budgets are no longer buried in the “general reserve” budget line, Israel has still refrained from disclosing the cost of running the reactors at Dimona and Sorek and related operations, although the budget for the salaries of the staff at the reactors appears as “salaries at associated units” in the Defence Ministry budget. Last year that budget line was 1.2 billion shekels. The budget of the Atomic Energy Commission is also public. It is 147 million shekels. And in 2014, Harel, the Defence Ministry director general at the time, told Haaretz there was also a 5 billion shekel budget line simply dubbed “special.”

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See also: IDF spies and hacks its way to victory

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