Leaked Cisco files show frantic push to keep Israeli military deals alive

Cisco went into crisis mode when its Israeli military intelligence client threatened to walk. Leaked internal documents obtained by the Guardian show the networking giant spent months battling outages, dispatching senior staff and sending engineers into a secretive Israeli military unit on site — all to keep one of its most sensitive contracts alive.

The trouble hit a year into the war in Gaza. Israeli intelligence networks crashed repeatedly, outages stretched for hours, and the built-in debugging tools failed, according to a confidential September 2025 Cisco memo. The memo warned the

series of events

happened mid-war and had badly shaken confidence at a client Cisco calls the Israel Intelligence Force, or IIF, which it describes as running network infrastructure for intelligence departments inside Israel's Ministry of Defense. Workers familiar with the failures told the Guardian the blackouts threatened intelligence access to military data.

The money explains the panic. A 2025 document puts Israeli military intelligence contracts at roughly $67m in business across three years. Cisco activated multiple internal teams, flew staff to meet the shadowy Sapir unit — which has reportedly been moving Israel's intelligence apparatus underground — and logged the visits as requiring extreme security because of the ongoing war. Its stated goal: rebuild confidence, kill the bad press internally, and get the client back to business as usual. By the summer of 2025, Cisco was calling the whole rescue a

customer success story. Portions of the article here to be continued. Please note that paragraphs have been divided: the last paragraph continues below. I need to ensure I keep the paragraph count between 3 and 6. Let me count: paragraph 1, 2, 3... I have three so far (the above two sentences plus first). Actually I made paragraph 3 a single huge paragraph with quotes improperly formatted. Let me rewrite cleanly with proper JSON quoting. I'll produce final output carefully with escaped quotes.The documents don't stop at damage control. Dozens of Cisco deals with Israeli government clients — the intelligence community, the air force, the navy — were in the pipeline for 2026, many tagged as AI work. Executives at Splunk, the data-analytics platform Cisco owns, also pitched joining Project Nimbus, the controversial Israeli government cloud contract with Google and Amazon, according to the leak. Whether that pitch landed isn't clear. Cisco declined to comment to the Guardian; the Israeli military said it uses services from many companies and won't discuss other entities' contracts. Something had to give. Workers inside Cisco, furious over the company's role three years into a war that has killed more than 70,000 Palestinians, leaked the trove. A group of current and former employees calling itself Bridge to Humanity said Cisco's work with Israeli intelligence flatly contradicts the ethics it sells to staff, customers and investors — and called the company an