Middle East Monitor / January 13, 2020
The former head of Israel’s National Information Directorate, Yarden Vatikay, has revealed how Israel converts secret intelligence into public campaigns in support of its interests, Israel Defense has reported.
In an exclusive interview with the website, Vatikay said: “The question of using intelligence materials is derived from the campaign you are conducting. The campaign involves various activities. It begins with what I want to transmit to my target audiences.”
He said that “Israel transmits to and conducts dialogues with three types of target audiences – the Israeli audience, the international audience, and the regional audience.”
Giving the Iranian nuclear archive as an example, he said: “We addressed an international target audience. Once this event had taken place, our objective was to find … relevant materials that would serve our message, which says ‘Iran lied all along’.”
These materials were translated from Farsi and checked, Vatikay said, stating that was a “complex process of converting top-secret material into information that may be publicised.”
He continued: “Some of the materials are problematic with regard to declassification. You do it together with the organ in charge of the materials. It may be the Mossad in the case of the Iranian nuclear archive, or the IDF Intelligence Directorate in the case of the uncovering of the Iranian missile precision factories in Lebanon.”
Regarding the press conference during which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu revealed information about Iran’s nuclear programme, he said: “We worked two months in advance on the materials of the archive.”
Vatikay revealed that Israel could use intelligence to re-write history and the narratives that say it carried out a massacres in efforts that have previously “prevented a very serious image crisis for Israel”.
