Former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton said Thursday that the Obama administration leaked a story about covert Israeli activity in Azerbaijan to thwart plans for potential military action against Iran’s nuclear program.
Speaking to Fox News, Bolton said he believes the U.S. government is actively working to prevent Israel from launching an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities. The former ambassador was responding to an article published last week in Foreign Policy magazine that quoted senior U.S. officials claiming Israel had been granted access to airfields in Azerbaijan along Iran’s northern border.
“I think this leak is part of the administration’s campaign against an Israeli attack,” Bolton told Fox News.
According to the Foreign Policy report, in 2009 a U.S. Embassy official in Azerbaijan sent a memo to the State Department that quoted Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev, who reportedly said that nine-tenths of his country’s ties with Israel are “below the surface.” The memo was later made public by WikiLeaks.
An intelligence official quoted in the Foreign Policy article said the U.S. is monitoring events in Azerbaijan and is “not happy” with the developments.
While the officials quoted in the article were not explicitly said to be White House officials, Bolton said he has no doubt they were. Bolton noted that the source of the leak was not likely to have been a single individual with his own agenda. “Clearly, this is an administration-orchestrated leak. This is not a rogue CIA guy saying I think I’ll leak this out.”
Bolton accused the U.S. administration of orchestrating a campaign to prevent Israeli military action against Iran, while admitting that he has no concrete evidence to support his claim. However, he cited a February statement by U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta who said he believed an Israeli strike on Iran could take place in April. “If that’s the case, then it would be entirely consistent for the administration to try to avoid that impending outcome,” Bolton said.
Meanwhile, according to another report published Saturday, the Mossad has scaled back its covert activities in Iran in recent months by “dozens of percent.”
Senior Israeli officials reportedly told Time magazine that the reduction covers a wide spectrum of operations, including assassinations and detonations at Iranian missile bases, but also efforts to gather firsthand intelligence on the ground and recruit spies.
One senior Israeli source said Mossad officials are “not satisfied” with the new policy. Another official attributed the curtailment to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu whom the article says was “worried about the consequences of a covert operation being discovered or going awry.”
“Netanyahu was traumatized by Israel’s failed attempt to assassinate [Hamas political bureau chief Khaled] Mashaal and does not want another failure on his hands,” the official said. Netanyahu was prime minister when the Mossad botched an attempt to assassinate Mashaal in Jordan in 1997.
Meanwhile U.S. government officials continue to emphasize that Iran still constitutes a potential threat to U.S. interests. In an interview with a U.S. Marine Corps reporter on Friday, Panetta said. “If Israel decides to act, we will have to defend ourselves. We may be involved earlier than we would want to be.”
After Panetta’s remarks, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Defense said however that the U.S. still views diplomacy as its first option.

By Yoni Hirsch

Israel Hayom