The briefing held off campus
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Asked whether he had ever interacted with the Mossad, John Kiriakou answered with a single word, "miserable", and then described the first such meeting he attended, and the ground rules he was given beforehand.

The rules

His boss told him he would be giving his first classified liaison briefing, that it would be to the Israelis, and that there were a couple of things he ought to know first.

The first was categorical. "We don't allow the Israelis into the building ever." Kiriakou asked why. "Because they spy on us."

The gifts

The elaboration he was given concerned what the visitors brought with them. They would always arrive with a present, and every item had to be x-rayed, and it would be found to contain listening devices "and it's packed with two years' worth of batteries."

Kiriakou reports the standing complaint and the standing answer: "You guys, you have to stop doing this. Every time you come here, you try to bug our conference rooms. It's bad form. You have to stop doing it." And the reply, "Oh, okay. Okay. We knew you would find it. We're just kidding. Come on."

The venue and the ceiling

The practical consequence was geographic. "So, we have to meet them miles away from headquarters in a place that we rent," he said. The second rule concerned content: "Nothing over the secret level. No top secret information, just up to secret."

The briefing itself

About a dozen analysts went. Kiriakou, roughly six weeks into the job, was the junior-most and so went last, after the chief analyst, the political analyst, the economics analyst, the military analyst, the oil analyst and the technical analyst had each spoken. Because he was overt at the time rather than under cover, he gave his own name.

His subject was Saddam Hussein's psychological state of mind. There were two Israelis present, one from Mossad and one from Shin Bet, which he glosses for his audience as the Israeli equivalents of the CIA and the FBI respectively.

What happened next, the Shin Bet officer asking him to spell his surname and then telling him "you are Jewish", is recorded separately, along with his colleagues' reaction afterwards that the same approach was made to every one of them.

See also

See also

- John Kiriakou
- MOSSAD
- Shin Bet
- Israeli intelligence presence in the United States
- Recruitment attempts on Kiriakou
