Israel's counterintelligence threat ranking
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Israel's counterintelligence threat ranking is the fact John Kiriakou returns to whenever the subject of intelligence sharing with Israel arises.

Asked about permanent liaison arrangements, he poses it as a quiz: "Israel is ranked in the intelligence community as critical threat for counterintelligence. Do you know the other countries that are ranked for critical in threat?" The list is North Korea, China, Russia, Iran and Cuba, "And Israel. Critical threat to the United States government. And this is specifically for spying against the US government and infiltrating the US government. Critical threat."

What makes it an argument rather than a fact is the policy response he places next to it: "instead, the response now is eh, just give them everything anyway. Just give it to them."

The DIA warning

Kiriakou notes the timing as an irony: in the same week that the 2027 fusion provisions were moving, "the Defense Intelligence Agency had to issue a warning to its own employees about stepped up Israeli spying on the United States", and "people just look at you square in the eye here in Washington like, there's no there's no problem here."

He places the Jonathan Pollard case in the same ledger, and says the pattern is simply not attended to: "We've chosen not to pay attention to the new DIA announcement that the Israelis have stepped up their espionage against the US government. And we're just pretending that all is is perfectly fine in the land of milk and honey and we're going to give the Israelis anything that they want. And as an American, I'm appalled by this. Appalled."

The first-day briefing, and the ranking that follows from it

Asked to rank in order the services best at getting Americans to work for them, Kiriakou put the Israelis first, the Russians second and the Cubans third. Pressed on why the first-ranked service should be one described as an ally, he went back to his induction, "granted, this is 36 years ago, but it is still current." On the first day, after swearing the oath, the class was briefed by the agency''s director of security, who told them their greatest challenge as individual officers would be counterintelligence, because "our friends and our enemies are going to try to exploit our own vulnerabilities."

The numbers he was given that day are the ones he still quotes: the Israelis had "two declared intelligence officers at the Israeli embassy in Washington, one from Mossad and one from Shin Bet", against "187 undeclared Israeli intelligence officers spread all across the United States, actively trying to recruit employees of our defense contractors."

His comparison with the other services is a matter of technique. The Chinese are "very, very laser-focused on technology" but have no feel for the culture they are operating in: "the Chinese will walk up to you and say, ''I will give you money, you give me technology'' ... at least buy me a drink first." The Russians, by contrast, "have a long view."

What the ranking would normally trigger

Pressed in August 2026 on what actually happened after the classification was reported, Kiriakou's answer was that nothing did, and that nothing could: "you really can't do anything because it's a political decision. It's a policy decision."

He describes the machinery that exists for the purpose. The CIA runs a counterintelligence centre whose job is to work with the FBI "to root out moles, foreign intelligence officers burrowing into the American government", work aimed, in the ordinary case, at Russians, Chinese, the occasional Cuban or Iranian. The chain breaks at the referral: the agency develops the information and passes it to the Bureau, and the Bureau's position is that it lacks "the political authorization to arrest these people or even to disrupt them." The rationalisation he reports is that the Israelis, unlike the Chinese or Russians, do not "mean us harm", so the conclusion is to "just let them get away with it."

The Netherlands test

To show the size of the exception, Kiriakou invents a neutral case. Suppose the Netherlands were ranked a critical counterintelligence threat. The consequences would be automatic and administrative: CIA employees would be barred from transiting Schiphol, "they're going to steal your laptop, they're going to steal your information, they're going to steal your identity", and the agency would "back off with liaison exchanges because they're going to be trying to recruit the liaison officers."

Set against that, his summary of the Israeli case is two words repeated: "we do literally nothing. Literally nothing. We just let them get away with it and invite them to the White House."

See also

- MOSSAD
- Jonathan Pollard
- NDAA 2027 US,Israel fusion provisions
- F-35 avionics dispute with Israel
