Quote:
Originally Posted by calculoso
Thanks for that - I must have missed the follow-up stories where they say Israel. Any idea if they were first to mention it or if the story came after someone else spilled the beans?
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From a cursory glance I think they're treating it as in the story below, where they're saying it's "reportedly" Israel, but they aren't confirming that this is what their own sources are saying. I take "reportedly" in this usage to mean that it's being widely reported in other media sources but they aren't confirming it. Generally if their original source had corroborated it, the correct thing to do would be to acknowledge that.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.d2055abdee52
I believe this NYT article was the first one that sourced the information to Israel (not sure if it's the only one).
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/16/w...ce-russia.html
Although (potentially importantly) it doesn't directly say that Israel was the country whose operations have been jeopardized here; though that leap has widely been made. It says that "At least some of the details that the United States has about the Islamic State plot came from the Israelis". It seems possible, although unlikely, that another ally was the one to gather the bit of information in a particular city that Trump then conveyed to the Russians.
(Crazy extrapolation time: let's suppose for a moment that the information was gathered by, say, a Turkish agent or another less-obvious ally, and this is information that nobody wants out, for both political and intelligence-gathering reasons. So the US and Israel intelligence communities both let enough information leak for everyone to assume that Israel is the nation involved, without confirming it and without saying anything factually wrong. I think this is far less likely than it simply being the Israelis involved, but just a reason for skepticism.)