Submitted by Tyler Durden: Earlier this year, relations between the US and Israel frayed after Israeli PM Benjamin 'The Baby Butcher of Gaza' Netanyahu — in an attempt to rally support for his reelection bid — implied that Arab Israelis shouldn’t vote before suggesting that a two-state solution to the Palestinian ‘issue’ would happen over his dead body. The Obama administration took that as a sign that Netanyahu was not dedicated to peace in the region.
The tension only grew when reports surfaced that Israel had spied on nuclear talks with Iran. Washington and Jerusalem have long played a kind of spy vs. spy game which both countries generally accept and tolerate, but this time around, Israel apparently passed the intelligence it gathered on to Congress in an attempt to undercut negotiations with Iran, something The White House did not appreciate. Here’s our rather amusing summary: The US spied on Israel and discovered that Israel was spying on the US, which under normal circumstances would be fine, but this time the Israeli spying was aimed at undermining US diplomacy, so this spying was unacceptable, but Israel contends that in fact, it did not spy on the US to obtain the sensitive information but in fact gathered it from spying on other countries.
On Wednesday, new details emerged about espionage and the Iran nuclear negotiations when Moscow-based cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab ZAO (more here) released a report detailing how an internal systems breach at the company led to the discovery of hacks at hotels which hosted the P5+1 Iran talks.