The density of spies in Washington
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The density of spies in Washington is John Kiriakou's answer to a viewer who asked whether anyone is still working on tracking and removing spies in the United States, whether it can be achieved, and whether the country will ever be free of foreign control.

Who does the work

Kiriakou identifies the responsible organisation and the exclusivity of its mandate. "So, the the FBI's counterintelligence division, that's literally all they do is to try to root out spies and to remove them or prosecute them."

Why it does not end

The task is described as structurally unfinishable. "Um, it's an ongoing never-ending job because more and more spies are coming here every day."

The reason is the concentration of targets. "There are more spies in Washington DC than anywhere else in the world."

The limit

Kiriakou's answer to the second half of the question is negative, and the qualification he attaches is the whole argument. "And um it's not possible to to win to root them all out. Unless you want to be North Korea."

The implication is that a society that could actually clear itself of foreign intelligence officers would have to accept a level of internal control that would cost more than the espionage does. Asked to characterise the effort, Kiriakou accepted the description offered on the programme and repeated it: "It's whack-a-ole. Yeah."

Working alongside allies

The same exchange turned to the Australian service. Kiriakou said he had never done anything operationally with the Australians, though he had briefed them a number of times, noting that as a Five Eyes partner "they're literally sitting there in the building." Their focus, as he expected, was China, "and that was never my thing." His verdict on them was warm: "They're quite good. They're quite a good service. Very good service."

The figure on the side of a bus

Kiriakou's shorthand for the scale is an advertisement rather than an estimate of his own. Buses in Washington carry advertising for the spy museum claiming "that there are 10,000 foreign spies in Washington DC" at any given time, and his gloss is that "there are more spies in Washington than in any other place in the world." He puts the number of countries running intelligence officers in the United States at something over two hundred.

What that means for a lunch

The practical consequence he illustrates with a case in which the eavesdropper happened to be a reporter rather than a foreign service. About four years before the interview, a White House counsel, Ty Cobb, whom he distinguishes from the baseball player, was having lunch with another White House attorney at a restaurant near Kiriakou's radio studio, across from the park facing the White House, and laid out his assessment and his legal strategy "full voice, in public."

The restaurant occupied the ground floor of the building housing the New York Times, and the paper's Washington bureau chief was at the next table. He wrote it all down, and it ran on the front page the next morning.

Kiriakou's point is that the outcome was the benign version of the same exposure: "that could just as easily have been a Russian KGB officer or a Chinese intelligence officer or an Israeli or a Brit or a French or a Cuban."

He also distinguishes what the services are listening for. The Chinese, like the Israelis in his account, are not primarily after political reporting from the fringes of the White House; they want the hard sciences, artificial intelligence, computing, mathematics, chemistry, and therefore listen in the manufacturing centres of the defence industry and in Silicon Valley rather than around the National Security Council.

See also

- Five Eyes
- The Greek colonel and China
- The operational test
- CIA National Resources Division
