Israeli intelligence presence in the United States
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John Kiriakou has described a sustained Israeli intelligence-collection effort against the United States, distinct from and predating the Jonathan Pollard case, based on briefings he received early in his CIA career and on his own subsequent postings.

The January 1990 briefing

Kiriakou says a CIA head-of-security briefing in January 1990 disclosed that the FBI had identified 189 undeclared Israeli intelligence officers operating across America, attempting to steal U.S. defense secrets, while only two Israeli intelligence officers, one from Mossad and one from Shin Bet, were formally declared at the Israeli embassy in Washington. The United States did not expel the identified undeclared officers, Kiriakou says, in contrast to its practice with identified Chinese, Russian, North Korean or Cuban operatives, because Israel's influence on Capitol Hill made such a disruption to the relationship "not worth" the diplomatic cost.

Kiriakou has repeated this figure, sometimes as 187, sometimes 189, across numerous later interviews, consistently describing it as an FBI count of undeclared Israeli intelligence officers embedded in American defense contractors nationwide, disclosed to him during CIA orientation alongside the two declared officers (one Mossad, one Shin Bet) posted to the Israeli embassy. In one retelling he places the same briefing on his first day at the CIA, describing a chief of security who first warned incoming officers never to eat at a steakhouse near CIA headquarters, reputed to be watched by the KGB for officers who forgot to remove their badges, before moving on to the Israel warning: "Even our friends spy on us." A companion retelling of the same warning describes the countries in the CIA's "critical threat" tier for counterintelligence as, at the time, the Soviet Union (now Russia), China, Cuba, North Korea, Iran, and Israel.

Kiriakou separately recounts that his very first foreign liaison briefing, conducted, in different retellings, about four to six weeks into his CIA career in March 1990, was for Mossad and Shin Bet officers, on the subject of whether Iraq might invade Kuwait. It had to be held off-site at a safe house rather than at CIA headquarters, because Israeli liaison officers were not permitted inside the building, unlike liaison officers from other countries he briefed there, including the Prime Minister of Fiji and the leader of the Kurdish Democratic Party. He says Israeli officers were barred from headquarters specifically because they had repeatedly brought gifts that, when X-rayed at the door as required of all visitors, were found to be packed with listening devices and batteries. At that same briefing, Kiriakou says, a Shin Bet officer looked up at him and said, "You are Jewish", an apparent recruitment feeler, to which he replied he was "not recruitable"; he later learned every new CIA analyst got the same treatment.

Kiriakou has since used the 1990 briefing as the baseline against which he measures a reversal. Asked in July 2026 whether the United States still has a CIA of its own, he began there: when he joined, "we did not like the Israelis at all. They were spying on us. They made it clear. They openly spied on us", and the gifts with listening devices in them were why "they were not allowed in the building," obliging the agency to rent space for liaison meetings. Against that he sets the proposed collocation of Israeli personnel with the Pentagon and the CIA, arriving in the same weeks as a Defense Intelligence Agency all-hands warning about Israeli recruitment inside DIA, and concludes that the two cannot both be true. His comparative test for the espionage itself is blunt: "if it was any other country in the world, we would be on the brink of war with them right now."

Harassment of a declared CIA couple in Jerusalem

Kiriakou describes friends of his, a married CIA couple posted to Jerusalem, who were immediately and officially "declared" to Mossad by the chief of station on arrival, the husband beginning Arabic study while the wife worked as the case officer. He recounts a subsequent series of intimidation incidents against the couple: their living-room furniture rearranged after a dinner at the U.S. ambassador's residence, people defecating in all of their toilets after a Christmas party, and their dog's tail cut off and left, wrapped in gauze, as a "going away present" when their tour ended. Kiriakou has related that a Mossad officer once told him the underlying rationale: Israel's survival depends on trusting no one, including the United States, and it will spy on Americans as readily as on Egyptians or Jordanians. In a related incident from the same period, Kiriakou says the U.S. ambassador's car had two tires shot out by unknown parties in the 1990s, after which "helpful" men who arrived to assist drove off with the ambassador's briefcase, which contained personnel folders.

Critical-threat classification

Kiriakou says that during his time at the CIA, Israel was classified as a "critical threat" for counterintelligence purposes, the same category as Russia, North Korea and Cuba, and a more serious classification than China. He has repeated this classification consistently across later interviews, sometimes with a slightly different roster of countries in the tier, Russia, China, Cuba, North Korea and Iran; or Russia, China, Cuba and Iran, but always with Israel included. He says he personally never went to Israel a single time during his entire CIA career, choosing Arab-country postings instead, in part because of that classification. Asked what the United States actually gets from the relationship with Israeli intelligence, Kiriakou says the only real benefit is counterterrorism cooperation and advanced technology, "that's it," with the rest being politics playing out on Capitol Hill.

Kiriakou has also described the setting of the briefing rather than only its content. New officers, he says, are taken in their first days to a room whose name they are not permitted to disclose, "call it the red room", and shown the leading espionage threats against the United States: Israel, China and Russia, with Cuba and France close behind. He treats the fact that he and another former officer of a different CIA generation independently recall the same room and the same list as corroboration that the ranking is institutional rather than personal.

He returns to the same judgement in a lighter register. Told at lunch in a crowded New York restaurant that Mossad has a policy of not spying on Americans, he says he laughed hard enough to fall off his chair: "They're like the number one threat of spying." When his companion challenged him to name one, his answer was Pollard, whom he then had to correct as military intelligence rather than Mossad. Arguing the point on Piers Morgan's programme, he put the target set specifically: the Israelis "are prolific in their espionage work in the United States, especially as it relates to American defense contractors."

Asked to rank foreign intelligence services by effectiveness at recruiting Americans to flip, Kiriakou has placed Israel first, ahead of Russia, China, and Cuba, noting that Cuba, in his assessment, has commoditized rather than truly operationalized its intelligence collection.

CIA policy of not spying on Israel

Kiriakou says it has long been CIA policy, which he characterizes as a form of discrimination, to decline to spy on Israel even though Israel spies on the United States. During his time at the agency, he says, officers were advised not to accept gifts from visiting Mossad officers and could no longer meet them inside CIA buildings, meeting instead at a separate third-party venue, because Israeli-provided gifts were routinely found to contain listening devices. Kiriakou says the United States shares roughly 95% of its intelligence with Israel but withholds about 5% because it is proprietary or could be used against American interests, and notes that Israel has previously passed U.S. intelligence to the Soviets, citing Jonathan Pollard as the example. On the first day of his CIA career, Kiriakou says, security briefers disclosed that the FBI had identified 187 undeclared Israeli spies operating in the U.S., in addition to declared personnel, engaged in stealing U.S. defense secrets and technology.

Fabricated intelligence on Iran

Kiriakou says the United States has historically lacked human intelligence sources inside Iran, largely because it has had no embassy there for decades. He describes Israeli intelligence filling part of that gap tactically by recruiting impoverished Afghan refugees inside Iran, who receive no food, housing or medical care from the Iranian state, paying them roughly 100 dollars a month to surveil the movements of Iranian nuclear scientists for potential targeting purposes. On strategic-level intelligence, however, Kiriakou says Israel has no source inside the Ayatollah's inner circle, and instead fabricates such intelligence and passes it to the CIA, at times claiming a highly sensitive, polygraphed source to lend the fabrication credibility.

Orthodox and Greek-American presence in the intelligence community

Kiriakou has noted a substantial presence of Orthodox Christians, particularly Greek Americans, within the U.S. intelligence community, saying there was a large group of Greek Americans at the CIA during his career of whom he was "always very proud."

Alleged death threats against activists

Kiriakou says he is not aware of the CIA, or any Western intelligence service, making direct death threats, but that many of his activist friends in Washington do receive death threats, sometimes in Hebrew, sometimes in Farsi with what he describes as Hebrew accents. He says he believes Israeli intelligence would be "perfectly happy" to threaten American citizens, just as it is happy to spy on the American government and defense-contracting community, or to recruit Americans such as Jeffrey Epstein and Jonathan Pollard.

See also

- Jonathan Pollard
- MOSSAD
- AIPAC
