Israeli integration into U.S. agencies
======================================

Israeli integration into U.S. agencies is the subject of an argument John Kiriakou makes from an internal contradiction rather than from policy preference. Asked in July 2026 whether the United States still has a CIA of its own, he set two contemporaneous facts against each other.

The first is legislative. A provision of the National Defense Authorization Act for 2027, numbered 219, and previously 224, would collocate Israeli personnel with the Pentagon and permit closer, "five eyes style" liaison with the CIA. Kiriakou notes that an earlier attempt was made without a vote, and that the opposition in Congress amounts to Thomas Massie, Ro Khanna and a handful of others.

The second is counterintelligence. Two weeks before the interview, NBC News reported that the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency had sent an all-hands email warning that the Israelis were "being unusually aggressive right now in trying to recruit assets inside DIA" and that every employee should be extra careful.

Kiriakou's objection is that both cannot stand: "Either the Israelis are ranked as critical threat for counter intelligence, which is what they were when I was there, along with the Russians, the Chinese, the Cubans, and the North Koreans, or we're joined at the hip. But it can't be both."

In a July 2026 telling Kiriakou describes the provision, read out to him from the House Armed Services Committee's proposal, within a record $1.15 trillion defense bill, as Section 224, the United States,Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative, as covering technology sharing, co-production of weapons systems, and bilateral research across biotech, autonomous systems, AI and cyber warfare. Asked whether it might amount to nothing more than adopting Israeli technology, his reading was that it goes further, and he framed the practical effect in terms of espionage becoming unnecessary: "that means they're not going to have to steal the 2% of defense technology that we don't give them." His illustration is the F-35, where Israel refused the deliberately degraded avionics package the Emirates accepted, and tasked its intelligence services with stealing whatever the downgrade consisted of so it could be reversed after delivery.

Kiriakou is careful about where he assigns fault, and it is not to Israel: "I don't fault the Israelis for doing this. If I were the prime minister of Israel, I would do the same thing when it comes to acquiring defense technology. I fault the U.S. government." He adds that the failure is bipartisan, "it makes not one whit of difference if there's a Democrat in the White House or a Republican in the White House. We don't stand up to the Israelis."

He offers the United Nations as the measure of how isolated the resulting alignment is, citing his own service at the UN: on the votes he has in mind, the entire world votes one way and the dissenting bloc is the United States, Israel, Costa Rica, and Palau, the last an island of some 30,000 people in the Pacific.

What changed

He sets the present arrangement against the one he entered. When he joined the CIA the agency "did not like the Israelis at all. They were spying on us. They made it clear. They openly spied on us", and brought gifts with listening devices embedded in them, to the point that Israeli officers were barred from the headquarters building entirely and the agency rented space elsewhere for liaison meetings.

Asked what changed, whether it is blackmail, Kiriakou says the answer is "broader and more nefarious than that," and political rather than personal. Arab leaders have told him, and told American ambassadors in his hearing, that the last U.S. president to give the Arabs a fair shake was George H. W. Bush; they also remember Kennedy and Eisenhower. Since then the pressure has been incremental, exerted through the White House and through AIPAC on Capitol Hill, until "if you disagree not just with Israeli policy, if you disagree with Benjamin Netanyahu as a person, you are labeled as anti-Semitic. Of course it took them decades to get to that point, but they did it."

Why he says merging militaries is not routine

Against the claim that the United States routinely merges its military with allies', Kiriakou draws the boundary at the Five Eyes: the British, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders. Israel is a member of neither NATO nor the European Union.

He then puts a case he treats as decisive. Israel's defence minister had said publicly that Israel's next war would be against Turkey, and Turkey is in NATO. If hostilities followed and Turkey invoked Article 5, the United States would be treaty-bound to go to war with Israel. "Is the United States going to go to war with Israel? Of course not. And so what happens? The Israelis then successfully destroy NATO."

On the espionage itself his standard is comparative: technology theft on this scale by any other country "would have us on the brink of war with them right now." The F-35 avionics dispute is the example he reaches for.

Police training

A form of integration already in place, Kiriakou notes, receives almost no mainstream coverage: Israeli police and IDF personnel training American police departments, including in Atlanta at the training facility known as Cop City. His objection is categorical, "I don't want the Israelis training American police departments. The Israelis have no respect for human rights or civil rights or civil liberties", and he frames the wider question as whether this is a country to throw in with, given that it "has bombed seven of its neighbors in the past year."

Where he thinks it ends

Asked how it stops, Kiriakou sets aside the optimism he says he is usually accused of. Every incremental change across thirty-five years has run in Israel's favour, and although polling now shows a clear majority of Americans saying the relationship is too close and that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, elected officials have not moved with them: roughly 77 percent of Democratic voters say they support the Palestinian side against about 90 percent of elected Democrats supporting Israel. The handful willing to break ranks does not grow. "And where does that leave us? That leaves us in a place where we don't have a democracy."

See also

- F-35 avionics dispute with Israel
- Israeli intelligence presence in the United States
- AIPAC
