Trump and Bibi shaking hands at podium

Mossad chiefs: Don’t share secrets with Trump

Two former heads of Mossad have urged Israel to withhold intelligence from the US after President Trump was accused of passed classified information to the Russians.

Danny Yatom, a former director of the spy agency, called the leak a “grave violation” and said that Israel should punish Washington for it. “We need to abstain from transferring information to [Trump], or to give him only partial information, so that he can’t endanger a source,” Mr Yatom, who led the agency from 1999 to 2001, said.

Shabtai Shavit, his predecessor, suggested that the new president was a danger to Israeli assets.

Mr Trump is said to have passed highly sensitive information to Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, during a meeting in the Oval Office on May 10. The information concerned an ISIS plot to smuggle bombs hidden in laptop computers on to aircraft. Israeli intelligence sources said that they learnt of the leak from sources inside the self-proclaimed caliphate, and alerted their counterparts at the CIA.

Read the full article by Gregg Carlstrom of The Times at The Australian (subscription only).