Israel’s foreign affairs minister has ordered his department’s employees to stop cooperating with the Mossad, according to media reports. Minister Avigdor Lieberman, one of Israel’s most hardline nationalist politicians, accuses the country’s covert operations agency of meddling in the tasks of Israel’s diplomatic community, while at the same time refusing to share its intelligence output with foreign affairs officials.

According to The Washington Times, which cites the Hebrew-language edition of reputable Israeli newspaper Yediot Achronot, Mr. Lieberman’s decision was prompted by the Israeli Prime Minister’s move to entrust the country’s relations with Turkey to a Mossad official. Media reports state that the spy agency’s David Meidan has been dispatched by Benjamin Netanyahu to Turkey, in order to patch up the Jewish state’s anemic relationship with its once close regional ally. This has enraged the foreign affairs ministry’s leadership, which was already upset over salary discrepancies between diplomats and Mossad spies, as well as the latter’s chronic refusal to share intelligence with foreign policy planners.

The friction between the Mossad and Israel’s diplomatic community goes back decades, but Lieberman’s controversial ascendance to Foreign Affairs Minister in 2009 intensified the turf war. At the beginning, Lieberman made calculated friendly gestures toward the Mossad, in one instance going as far as appointing a former Mossad official as Israel’s first-ever ambassador to Turkmenistan. But such moves quickly gave way to direct bureaucratic confrontations, which included direct strikebreaking action by Mossad officers, who assumed the duties of Foreign Affairs officials when the latter went on strike demanding better pay and work conditions.

The Washington Times states that the practical effect of the near-complete breakdown in relations between the Mossad and the Foreign Affairs ministry is “not immediately clear”. It notes, however, that the Ministry provides essential support to the spy agency’s operations abroad, including travel documentation, office space, and cash payments through diplomatic pouches.

http://intelligencenews.wordpress.com/2011/11/18/01-869/

I’ve been reporting here lately on reports that the Shin Bet refused to provide Avigdor Lieberman security clearances that would’ve enabled him to see top secret documents about his then portfolio as minister of strategic affairs, Iran. An authoritative Israeli source also reported on longstanding rumors that Lieberman might be a KGB mole recruited to make aliya when he was a young man.

Now comes a new report in Yediot Achronot about an explosion between Lieberman and the Mossad that caused the minister to sever ties with the agency. Supposedly, the tension involves the spymasters usurping the authority of the foreign ministry with regard to relations with other nations. There are some nations which have rendered Israeli foreign ministry personnel as persona non grata. In some of them, the nations in question actually prefer to conduct relations with the Mossad, thus creating a side-channel that avoids the ministry altogether.

The Mossad also sends its secret cables from Israeli embassies throughout the world, but prevents the foreign ministry from seeing them. This causes the MFA officials to feel the Mossad is willing to take from them but not to give in return. The article quotes a ministry source:

In some instances they operated behind the backs of Israeli diplomats abroad and damaged their status. They put us through all sorts of rigamarole and we had to put a stop to this behavior.

The straw that broke the camel’s back apparently revolved around an incident in Israel-Turkish relations. During the period when there was no ambassador there, the Mossad developed its own contacts with the Turks arousing the ire of Lieberman and his colleagues. In some cases, the Turks appeared to favor dealing with the Mossad over the MFA.

As a result Lieberman’s announced the MFA will no longer share its cables with the Mossad.

http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/2011/11/17/lieberman-severs-ties-with-mossad/


If Mossad is trying to arrange ties with Turkey and Turkmenistan then they are following reasonably calculated national interests. So what's Lieberman's deal? Is this just petty careerism or is the Mossad legitimately concerned about Lieberman as a threat to state interests? The American-Israeli spy that was arrested in Egypt was claimed not to be Mossad; if that's true then maybe he was Lieberman & co's. If there is a Saudi-Israeli neofascist axis developing, seeking regional dominance independent of NATO hegemony, then Lieberman would clearly be on that side, Mossad, Aman and Shin Bet on the other.