The Israelis are free agents
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The Israelis are free agents is the phrase John Kiriakou uses for a claim he makes about intelligence liaison rather than about politics: that Israeli cooperation with the United States is contingent, and that treating it as an alliance produces bad predictions about where American product ends up.

He states it each time with a preface about what saying it costs him: "I'm going to get threats from the Israelis again. Every time I say something like this, I get threats, but I'm going to say it again anyway."

The claim

> "The Israelis are free agents. The Israelis are not necessarily our friends. They are when it suits them. But when it suits them to be friendly with the Russians, they go with the Russians, or with the Chinese or the Germans or, you know, anybody. It doesn't make any difference. The Israelis do what's best for the Israelis."

The operational consequence is the point of the formulation. If an Israeli-run access agent collects something of value, nothing in the relationship prevents it travelling onward: "if that means using a source like Jeffrey Epstein and passing information on to a hostile intelligence service, or at least one that's hostile to the United States, that's exactly what they're going to do."

Where he applies it

He advances it in support of his standing reading of Jeffrey Epstein as an access agent most likely run by Mossad, and it is the premise behind his exchange with Alan Dershowitz about what an admission of Israeli espionage would actually have done to Epstein's sentence.

See also

- Access Agent
- Jeffrey Epstein
- MOSSAD
- Alan Dershowitz
- Jonathan Pollard
