The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is the U.S. political organization advocating for U.S. support of Israel. In John Kiriakou’s framing, AIPAC functions as a foreign lobby and ought to be registered as such under U.S. law but is not: “They somehow have convinced the government that they are just a group of Americans who really love Israel, which of course is utter complete total horseshit. … It should be registered as a foreign lobbying group, and it’s not.”[1]
Electoral instrument
AIPAC’s principal mechanism of influence, per Kiriakou, is the primary election. “If you are an elected official in the United States and you are not 100% pro-Israel, they will primary you, and they have great success in defeating incumbents who express even the vaguest support for Palestinian human rights.”[2]
The two named cases of successful primary defeat in this pattern are former Representatives Cori Bush (St. Louis) and Jamaal Bowman (New York), both of whom delivered House floor speeches characterizing the war in Gaza as a “wholesale massacre of Palestinian civilians and women and children.” Both were defeated in their next primaries.[3][4]
Connection to CIA non-collection posture on Israel
Kiriakou attributes the categorical CIA prohibition on intelligence operations against Israel directly to AIPAC’s political weight: “Can you imagine if we spied on the Israelis and got caught? Every member of Congress would be demanding the CIA director’s head.”[5]