Secret ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia began taking shape in 2006 under then-Mossad Director Meir Dagan, who was apparently the first Israeli to establish direct contact with officials in the kingdom. Four years later, when Eyal Tzir Cohen was appointed head of the Middle East Department in the Mossad's Tevel Division, which oversees the agency's foreign relations, the ties Dagan had forged were already firmly established. "I inherited the relationship the Mossad had developed with Saudi Arabia," Tzir Cohen says.
During that tentative period, contacts with Saudi Arabia were generally conducted through a third party, in what the Mossad calls a "special liaison." "For example, I could ask an American contact to arrange a meeting between the Mossad representative in Washington and our contact at the Saudi Embassy, during a White House reception or something similar," Tzir Cohen recalls. "They would slip into a side room and talk."
Over time, he says, the goal was to take the relationship further. "Our ambition was to move from third-party contacts to direct engagement with intelligence professionals, then to political officials and ultimately to the leadership. We were looking for channels into the royal family, even though the Saudis were extremely worried that their ties with us would be exposed. Our interest was to spread the 'virus' of cooperation as far as they could tolerate it. Part of that meant solidifying ties at the professional level and turning them into personal relationships. So sometimes we initiated operations that, even if they had little intelligence or military value, created opportunities for Israelis and Saudis to sit together. The personal connection was what we were after."
As with any relationship between countries and intelligence agencies, these secret ties were driven by mutual interests. Over the years, Riyadh sought valuable Israeli intelligence and various cyber capabilities, while Jerusalem hoped to cultivate contacts at the highest levels of one of the Middle East's wealthiest and most powerful countries, a potential counterweight to Iran.
But apart from a handful of disclosures, including revelations that Israel's NSO Group had supplied Saudi Arabia with its Pegasus spyware, the covert relationship between the two countries remained a closely guarded secret.
That changed about a month ago, when a report by Danny Zaken in Israel Hayom revealed that Saudi Arabia had recently approached Israel through US Central Command (CENTCOM), seeking intelligence to help it confront the increasingly powerful Houthi rebels in Yemen.
Neither Israel nor Saudi Arabia will acknowledge it, but Houthi leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi claimed in a speech delivered just days after Zaken's report that, in exchange for intelligence from Israel, Saudi Arabia had "opened its airports to Israeli intelligence flights against Yemen."
This is known as intelligence-sharing, or more formally, FORINT (foreign intelligence). It is a branch of intelligence work in which agencies exchange information with their counterparts in other countries, sometimes even hostile ones, to expand their intelligence-gathering capabilities or establish and strengthen diplomatic relations.
Despite the failures surrounding the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack, Israeli intelligence remains one of the world's premier intelligence brands, supported by an extensive network of international partnerships. According to foreign reports, Israel maintains intelligence cooperation with at least 25 countries, ranging from the US, European nations and Persian Gulf states to countries such as Brazil and Panama in Latin America. All are interested in what Israel has to offer.
"Israel has prevented a great many terrorist attacks through intelligence it shared with its partners," a former top-ranking official in Israel's intelligence community says. "I'm talking about major plots that were thwarted. Assassinations of senior figures, mass-casualty terrorist attacks, assaults on military forces and more."
Examples are not hard to find. In August, The Wall Street Journal reported that Israel had provided the US with intelligence about an Iranian plot to assassinate President Donald Trump by bringing down Air Force One as he prepared to depart Turkey. In July 2024, reports emerged that Israel had supplied France with intelligence that prevented a terrorist attack during the Olympic Games. In 2018, Israeli intelligence was credited with thwarting a plot to bomb an Australian passenger plane flying from Sydney to Abu Dhabi. And those are just a few examples.
"In many cases, Israeli intelligence is ahead of that of our partners, including the Americans," the former intelligence official continues. One objective, he explains, is to bolster the standing of Israel's political leaders. "After a piece of intelligence is passed along and saves lives, the defense minister or prime minister can pick up the phone the next day, call that country's president and say, 'We saved your asses. You owe us.' That has tremendous value."
The full article will be published this weekend in Israel Hayom's magazine supplement.
