The lives of staff at the US embassy in Cairo may have been put in jeopardy by the indicted Democratic senator Bob Menendez’s alleged sharing of sensitive personnel information with the Egyptian government, according to former senior US officials who said the charges represented a grave betrayal of trust.
The New Jersey senator temporarily stepped down from his powerful position as chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee in September after he was indicted by federal prosecutors in New York on corruption charges, including allegations that he accepted cash bribes and gold bars in exchange for breaching his duties “in ways that benefited the government of Egypt”.
Menendez pleaded not guilty to the allegations and has resisted calls for his resignation, including from fellow Democrats.
Among former senior US officials and some Egyptian dissidents, one accusation included in the indictment against the senator stands out: that in May 2018, Menendez procured details from the state department about the number and nationalities of people working at the US embassy in Cairo, one of the largest US missions in the Middle East.
Menendez is accused of passing this information to Egyptian officials, via his partner, Nadine Menendez, and a New Jersey businessman, Wael Hanna, who recently pleaded not guilty to charges that he bribed the senator. Menendez, Nadine Menendez and Hanna have all denied wrongdoing.
The indictment states that “although this information was not classified, it was deemed highly sensitive because it could pose significant operational security concerns if disclosed to a foreign government or if made public”.
The FBI has also reportedly opened a counterintelligence investigation related to the charges.
“If the allegation is true, this is reprehensible. One of the worst aspects of this is that it’s not only selling influence, it’s really putting people’s lives in jeopardy,” said a former high-ranking state department official who worked across the Middle East, including Egypt.
“I’d label this charge in the indictment a betrayal of trust,” said Gordon Gray, a former diplomat with 35 years in the foreign service whose postings included ambassador to Tunisia, senior adviser to the US ambassador to Iraq and deputy chief of mission in Cairo.
“Our Egyptian employees … work for us under potentially high risk to themselves and their families.”
He added: “It’s also a betrayal of trust of the US government writ large to protect its people.”
The state department declined to respond to questions about the impact of the apparent leak or whether it was providing additional security to individuals who may have been compromised.
US personnel with knowledge of the Egyptian security state have long understood the specific risks facing diplomats based in Cairo – and that those working at the embassy, particularly Egyptian nationals, were likely to be the target of surveillance by Egyptian intelligence. Such fears sharply increased after the 2013 military coup that brought Egyptian president Abdel-Fatah al-Sisi to power, which spurred a resurgence in the power of Egyptian intelligence bodies.
For the US embassy in Cairo, the arrest and detention of staffer Ahmed Aleiba a year later was a watershed moment. Reporting in Egyptian pro-government media suggested that Aleiba, an Egyptian national, was detained and transferred to the custody of an Egyptian intelligence body after accusations that he had coordinated meetings between US officials and the Muslim Brotherhood, a banned group.
Pressure on foreign missions has also extended to those who meet with diplomats: in 2020, two employees of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, a prominent human rights organisation, were detained by security forces after hosting a meeting for a group of western diplomats at their offices in Cairo.
“The Egyptian government is less interested in dissuading people working for Americans than using these people as intelligence-gathering assets, so it’s not necessarily a physical safety thing for Americans in a place like Egypt,” said the former state department official. “This also means that the government of Egypt, which receives over $1bn annually from the USA, is gathering intelligence on another country that anointed them a major non-Nato ally.”
The US grants Egypt $1.3bn in foreign military aid annually, while the Biden administration recently opted to withhold $85m, citing rights concerns. Following Menendez’s indictment, acting foreign relations committee chairman Ben Cardin as well as members of Congress moved to block a further $235m, the maximum possible amount, until Egypt’s record on human rights improves.
Others said that while the information on embassy staff that Menendez allegedly passed to Egyptian officials was subject to constant change, it was valuable because Egyptian intelligence would have been able to compare it to other data secured through surveillance, to gauge which members of the embassy could be employees of US intelligence organisations and target Egyptian staff working there long term.
“The Egyptian government wouldn’t just be relying on Menendez for information like this – obviously they have their own sources and methods of how to source it, including visas, passports and counting the numbers,” said Ben Fishman, a former member of the US national security council overseeing north Africa and Jordan. Referring to the allegations in the indictment, he added: “Being willing to convey that information and forward it on is, in my view, inappropriate for a senator.”
Gray pointed to how Egyptians employed at the embassy are particularly vulnerable to intimidation by local security forces. “The pressures that the locally engaged staff face are always on the mind of US embassies, at least US embassies in non-democracies,” he said.
“They don’t have diplomatic immunity, and their families are there. It can be a much more precarious situation for them.”
One US-based Egyptian dissident said the Egyptian government would be aware of Egyptians staffing the US embassy in Cairo, and believed there were likely already informants who work for Egypt inside the embassy.
But he said the alleged sharing of sensitive and non-public information, as described in the indictment, meant that Egypt gained another, highly reliable, source of information about embassy employees.
“It would have been seen as a definitive list,” the person said.
