In a December 2025 conversation about domestic counterintelligence, John Kiriakou raised a case he says had surfaced in the New York Times about six months earlier.
The storefronts
There had been a revelation, he said, about Chinese nationals who have what appear to be ties to the Chinese police, and who are simply operating out of storefronts around Manhattan — driving or flying around America to threaten Chinese people. The threat he describes is specific: stop talking about China, or we are going to arrest your aunt and uncle in Beijing and beat them. That kind of thing. [1] [2]
His own reaction was a single line: I don’t know how the FBI missed it. He added that this is one example of what needs to be shut down. [2]
The scale problem behind it
Kiriakou raised the case in response to the point that American counterintelligence is overwhelmed: just in China, his interlocutor observed, more cases have been opened than can be sustained — and those are only the ones that get found. Kiriakou agreed. [3] He also endorsed the underlying asymmetry, saying that China has a gigantic, almost unlimited intelligence asset in that anybody can be turned into somebody for the state, and that this is very hard to combat. [4]
The posture he criticises
The exchange sits inside a wider argument Kiriakou makes about American counterintelligence being defensive by temperament. He agreed with the proposition that for all America’s strength in intelligence collection it is very passive about it and does not like to go on offence — and went further, saying that frankly he does not think the United States is terribly good at intelligence, with nothing to show for twenty years of work but a lot of dead bodies. [5] He extends the criticism to recruitment as a whole in his verdict on the CIA’s record, telling the same interviewer that if the agency were good at it there would never have been a 9/11, and that the United States has got just about every major world event wrong from 1947 to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. [6] [7]