Why the very strange leaks from Secretary of Defense Panetta?

By Isaac Yetiv, PhD
Isaac Yetiv, PhD

LA JOLLA, California — There are different kinds of “leaks.” There are inadvertent leaks such as the US President’s “microphone malfunctions” in Paris with former President Sarkozy, and in Moscow with former President Medvedev, and there are deliberate leaks intended to achieve a political result, which sometimes backfire.

In military intelligence parlance, the latter are called “disinformation” when their goal is to mislead the enemy by feeding it false information. The most famous of them is, of course, the D-Day landing of the allies’ gigantic armada in Normandy, in 1944, after feeding the Abwehr, Hitler’s military intelligence,  with false but plausible information that the site of the landing would be in the Pas-de- Calais.
But a few months ago, a different kind of leak stunned the country : the Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta appeared on TV and announced to the world that Israel would attack Iran in April, May or June of this year.  Because of his high position in the U.S. government, and the well-known tight military ties between the U.S. and Israel ,his strange “revelation” could not lack credibility. But whether true or false, and whatever its motivation, it is unheard of for a US Seretary of Defense to make public military plans of an ally, of the best ally America has ever had, when secrecy is of the outmost importance.
As if it were not enough, this perplexing contretemps was followed by another one, even more damaging to Israel : Originating in Europe, and attributed without much conviction to US military intelligence, it purports that Azerbaijan  had agreed to allow Israel to use its territory to attack Iran. If this is true, uncovering the secret renders it IPSO FACTO inoperative. Maybe that was the intent, who knows? And if it is false, why do it? Maybe to frighten the Iranians? Very naive thinking .
Azerbaijan was quick to deny the “rumor.” Israel just confirmed its sale of weapons to Azerbaijan, which were needed “to defend itself against its neighbors, Iran from the South and Russia from the North.”
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Yetiv is a lecturer on international affairs and freelance writer based in La Jolla, Calfornia.  He may be contacted at isaac.yetiv@sdjewishworld.com