Reports: U.S., Britain Spied on Israeli Drones in a 1998 Project

New reports citing documents leaked by Eric Snowden, a former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor, are stating that the United States and Britain hacked into Israeli drones and tracked their feeds nearly two decades ago.

The reports published by three outlets, which included German paper, Der Spiegel and the website, The Intercept stated that the joint project, titled "Anarchist" based out of Cyprus, was started in 1998. Spies from the NSA and the UK's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) were able to successfully crack the code of the drones, allowing them to read and watch all of Israel's activities in the Middle East.

The Intercept provided a quotation from a 2008 GCHQ report that explained why the program was necessary.

The quotation read: "This access is indispensable for maintaining an understanding of Israeli military training and operations and thus an insight to possible future developments in the region. In times of crisis this access is critical and one of the only avenues to provide up to the minute information and support to U.S. and Allied operations in the area."

The Intercept report stated that in the leaked documents, there were snapshots from videos taken from the bird's-eye view of the Israeli drones. Some of the images also showed what appeared to be drones with missiles, although the images were not clear enough.

The leaked information also revealed that the program had hacked into other systems associated with Egypt, Turkey, Iran and Syria.

Israel's Yedioth Ahronoth reported specifically that the U.S. NSA and Britain's GCHQ spied on Israel during its missions in the Gaza enclave of Palestine, Syria and Iran.

Israel has expressed its disappointment at the published reports, stating that Israel has never spied on the U.S.

"I do not think that this is the deepest kingdom of secrets, but it is certainly something that should not happen, which is unpleasant," Israeli Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz said to Israel's Army Radio reported by Reuters. "We will now have to look and consider changing the encryption, certainly."

Steinitz added, "We know that the Americans spy on the whole world, and also on us, also on their friends. But still, it is disappointing, inter alia because, going back decades already, we have not spied nor collected intelligence nor hacked encryptions in the United States."

The American and British spokesman at their respective embassies in Israel stated that they do not comment on matters involving intelligence.