The former UK prime minister describes the suspicious incident in his memoir

A UK security team found a listening device in the personal lavatory of then-foreign secretary Boris Johnson back in 2017, after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used the facility, the British politician has claimed in his memoir.

The incident allegedly occurred at Foreign Office, which has a bathroom similar to “the gents in a posh London club,” located in a “secret annex” used by the foreign secretary, the book says, as reported by The Telegraph on Thursday. Netanyahu was in the building on an official visit, and apparently made a toilet trip while there.

“Thither Bibi repaired for a while, and it may or may not be a coincidence but I am told that later, when they were doing a regular sweep for bugs, they found a listening device in the thunderbox,” Johnson wrote.

The politician – who served as UK prime minister from 2019 to 2022 – declined to give the newspaper further details, saying that everything that can be made public is already in the memoir, titled Unleashed.

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The Telegraph said it was unclear whether the attempted espionage resulted in any diplomatic fallout. It compared the episode to the discovery, at around the same time, of surveillance devices in Washington DC, which were reportedly attributed to the Israeli intelligence service Mossad.

The US incident involved so-called IMSI-catchers, or StingRays, according to media reports. The device mimics a regular cell tower to trick a mobile phone into revealing its unique ID number.

Such snooping equipment was found near several sensitive locations in the US capital, including the White House. Israel allegedly tracked the phone used by then-President Donald Trump through such techniques.

Previously, the British media highlighted another episode described in Johnson’s book. In 2021, his government considered a raid on the Netherlands to secure some 5 million doses of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine against Covid-19, over which the UK and the EU had a dispute.