Soviet active measures targeted the U.S.-Israel alliance as early as the 1960s. The tradecraft has evolved. The objective has not.
Feb. 28 clarified the stakes.
“Operation Epic Fury” eliminated Iran’s supreme leader, the ground forces commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, its defense minister and more than 40 senior officials in a single coordinated strike. The same intelligence architecture destroyed Iran’s primary enrichment facilities last June.
The analytical focus should not be on the geopolitical fallout, which will occupy policymakers for years. It should be on what the operation revealed about capability.
The NSA-Unit 8200 partnership penetrated the innermost circles of a hardened, compartmentalized theocratic security state deeply enough to locate three simultaneous leadership gatherings and strike them all. No other bilateral intelligence relationship in the world has demonstrated this capacity. Moscow and Beijing have understood this for some time. Feb. 28 made it legible to everyone else.
The campaign to erode this partnership long predates the strikes. It has been deliberate, multi-vector and strategically coherent across two rival great powers that otherwise coordinate on very little.
The Russian vector is the most doctrinally explicit. Aleksandr Dugin, the ultranationalist political theorist whose Foundations of Geopolitics has served as a textbook at the Academy of the General Staff, called in 1997 for Russian special services to “introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts.”
Dugin, 64, is a U.S.-sanctioned figure who began his political career in Pamyat, the Soviet-era antisemitic ultranationalist movement, a lineage worth noting because it connects post-Soviet influence doctrine directly to antisemitism as an operational tool.
Within hours of the Feb. 28 strikes on the Islamic Republic, Dugin was on X amplifying Iranian state-linked accounts and calling for global insurrection. His textbook’s prescriptions have long since become operational. A neo-Nazi accelerationist network operates a recruitment and propaganda infrastructure from St. Petersburg, targeting American and European audiences. A 2024 federal indictment exposed a $10 million covert RT operation funding American influencers to broadcast Kremlin-aligned narratives without source disclosure. And planning documents from “Operation Doppelganger,” the influence campaign identified by the U.S. State Department, explicitly listed “American Jews” as a target demographic for content designed to polarize U.S. public opinion on Israel.
These are not disconnected initiatives. They represent a sustained effort to raise the domestic political cost of U.S.-Israel intelligence cooperation to the point where it becomes untenable.
The Chinese vector operates through different mechanisms toward the same end. In testimony before the House Natural Resources Committee in December 2024, I was among the first to detail how Neville Roy Singham, a technology entrepreneur who sold his company for $785 million and subsequently relocated to Shanghai, has funneled more than $20 million to the People’s Forum, ANSWER Coalition and CODEPINK—organizations that operate under an anti-war banner while functioning as conduits for CCP-aligned messaging.
The House Ways and Means Committee, the House Oversight Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee have all opened investigations. Congress has subpoenaed Singham.
The network’s operational tempo is instructive: These organizations mobilized in support of Hamas within hours of the terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. On Feb. 28, they had nationwide protests operational with pre-printed signage by 2:34 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, before most of the American public was aware that strikes had occurred. This is not grassroots mobilization. It is pre-positioned infrastructure activated on cue.
The strategic convergence is worth stating plainly. Russia and China share almost no ideological common ground. They coordinate poorly on most fronts. But they have independently arrived at the same conclusion: The U.S.-Israel intelligence partnership represents a capability that neither can match, and both must degrade.
Antisemitism—as an operational tool, not a sentiment—serves that purpose uniquely well. It is the lever that simultaneously delegitimizes Israel as a partner, fractures domestic consensus across both American political parties, and reinforces anti-interventionist narratives that constrain U.S. power projection globally. The operational logic is elegant precisely because it exploits a pre-existing vulnerability rather than manufacturing one.
Feb. 28 demonstrated what this partnership can produce when the political will exists to employ it. The campaign to ensure that will never materialize again has been running for decades.
It accelerated after Oct. 7. It will intensify now.
