The State Department refused to comment today on press reports that the U.S. has been supplying Syria and Egypt, as well as Israel, with spy plane photographs during the past few years.
The reports, attributed to “defense sources,” said the sharing of aerial photographs began in 1976, after Israel and Syria signed a disengagement agreement on the Golan Heights. The sources said that neither Syria nor Egypt, which broke with the Arab states to begin its peace process with Israel in 1977, receive all of the photographs.
Syria gets reconnaissance photos of the areas where its troops face Israeli forces, as on the Golan Heights and in Lebanon and Egypt gets material where it is involved, the sources said. According to the reports, the spy planes are TR-2s, an updated version of the U-2, which take off from British air bases on Cyprus. Israel, Syria and Egypt receive advance notice of the flights, the sources said.
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