In mid-October, a series of images taken by U.S. reconnaissance satellites showing combat maneuvers of the Israeli army, as well as documents revealing the logistics accompanying the plans of Benjamin Netanyahu's government to attack key assets of Iran, began to circulate on a pro-Iranian Telegram channel.
All this information and images were part of a report prepared by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), a significant intelligence division of the U.S. Department of Defense that analyzes satellite images to support various military operations, many of them highly classified, by Washington or allied countries worldwide.
The NGA report was intended for one of the classified information exchange channels of the Five Eyes intelligence group, the alliance formed by the U.S., UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. These channels operate under strict security protocols because they handle very sensitive information that could escalate regional tensions in many parts of the world, such as the Middle East.
Therefore, all alarms went off in Washington when it was realized that this ultra-secret information on how Israeli forces were preparing for possible attacks against Iran was circulating in Telegram groups linked to the Islamic Republic. A discreet investigation then began to determine who had leaked these documents.
This investigation has led to the arrest of a CIA spy accused of disclosing the information in Cambodia this week. The agent, identified as Asif William Rahman, was arrested on Tuesday in the Southeast Asian country and transferred to a federal court in Guam, the U.S. island in the Western Pacific. According to several U.S. media outlets, Rahman was charged last week in a Virginia court with two counts of "deliberate transmission of national defense information."
The accused, as a CIA spy stationed in Cambodia and other Asian countries, had a top-secret security clearance, allowing access to confidential documents like those produced by the NGA. The information circulated on October 17 via Telegram from the pro-Iranian account Middle East Spectator. In other words, the documents had probably already passed through Tehran. The channel claimed that the documents had been provided by "an informed source" within the U.S. intelligence community.
"The Israel Defense Forces are carrying out key ammunition preparations and covert unmanned aerial vehicle activity that are almost certainly for an attack on Iran. We cannot definitively predict the scale and scope of an attack that may occur without any further warning," the document read as reported in media outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post.
At the end of last month, the Israeli military carried out three waves of airstrikes on Iranian military targets in response to the previous Iranian attack with 200 missiles on Israeli territory. The reports leaked by the American spy outlined different plans for a larger-scale Israeli attack, as well as the aircraft and ammunition that could be used.