Iran International
An official in Jake Sullivan's office leaked information about Saudi Israeli peace talks just before the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023, a US academic who assisted Jared Kushner in the Abraham Accords, told Iran International.
Jeff Sonnenfeld, appearing on the Eye for Iran podcast, said a deputy on National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan’s team may have leaked information about the Biden administrations discussion with Saudi Arabia and Israel on expanding the Abraham Accords, just prior to Hamas launching the Oct 7 attacks.
A spokesperson from the National Security Advisor told Iran International that this claim is false.
Sonnenfeld did not expose the individual's identity and said that person, who he described as a man, did not have malicious intent, but allegedly bragged too much and that gave Hamas wind of what was to come.
“Jake Sullivan, who I think is fantastic, he had a deputy who apparently can't stop talking and stuck a finger in the eye of Hamas on October 5th or 6th, just days before the next critical conclusory stage of the Abraham Accords was to be signed with Saudi Arabia and even Mahmoud Abbas from the Palestinian Authority signing on,” said Sonnenfeld.
“It would have been amazing but by tempting fate like that Hamas realized this was their last moment to strike,” he added.
There have been several analysts who speculated that the Iran-backed proxy launched Oct 7 to counter a formal alliance between Israel and Iran’s Sunni adversary Saudi Arabia, thereby shifting the balance of power in the Middle East.
While Saudi normalization with Israel was within reach, the Oct 7 attack and new revelations about the alleged leak killed any chance of a peace deal between the two nations.
The historic Arab-Israeli normalization agreements of 2020 have been touted as a triumph of US diplomacy. Under the Trump administration, the US brokered four deals in five months that built diplomatic, social, economic and peaceful relations between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco. Direct flights between Israel and some of the Arab countries started and embassies opened for the first time.
It was a massive rupture from the rhetoric in which Arab nations would not negotiate with Israel until Palestinians received an independent state of their own
Just days before Saudi Arabia was set to sign on, Hamas launched its attack, sparking a war with Israel that derailed the process amid intense violence in Gaza.
The Biden administration inherited the Abraham Accords—one of the few policies the outgoing president chose to carry forward from his predecessor, Donald Trump.
It appears a certain member of the Biden administration had a knack for revealing too much at a critical time, according to Sonnenfeld who attended the 2019 Peace through Prosperity conference in Bahrain, which outlined the Abraham Accords.
"There is one deputy in there that you name the crisis from the Middle East to Central Europe, this guy can't stop talking."
Sonnenfeld had a lot of praise for President Joe Biden and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan but said the individual who allegedly leaked the information did a lot of harm.
"He's beyond naive. It is his negligence and malpractice in office, but he's rather full of himself and quite a dandy on top of that," Sonnenfeld described the man he didn't name for legality purposes.
Sonnenfeld said the leaks that would come out what he called the ill-timed bragging was detrimental to progress.
When asked on the Eye for Iran podcast whether this individual may have inadvertently influenced the timing of the Iran-backed Hamas attack on Israel, Sonnenfeld responded, “It didn’t help.”
"That was an ill-timed irritant. As President Biden had acknowledged months later, they were just days away from that formal signing that as this reckless individual, I don't think he had any personal gain out of it. It was just pure arrogance and self-importance."
You can watch the full episode of Eye for Iran featuring Jeff Sonnenfeld on YouTube, or listen on Spotify, Castbox, Apple or Amazon.
