Israeli interception of US secure calls is the episode John Kiriakou offers when asked whether Israeli intelligence really does listen to American officials. He dates it to about six months into his service at the CIA.[1]
The equipment mattered to the story. The agency used portable encrypted telephones — “we used to have these phones called STU-3s”, alongside STU-II units — which were secure but not fixed installations. The procedure was to place the call in the clear, confirm the other party was ready, and then press the encryption button, after which “the phone encrypts itself and then it just sounds like gibberish to an outside listener.” Their known defect was that they would “occasionally drop the call.”[2]
A colleague in Kiriakou’s office was on such a call with a counterpart overseas when the encryption dropped. Waiting to see whether the other party would return, he instead heard two other voices on the line: “Moshe, did they hang up?” — and the answer, “I don’t know, David, maybe they dropped the call” — followed by “okay, they’ll call back if it’s important.”[3]
Kiriakou states the inference plainly rather than leaving it implied: “we’re supposed to take that for decades the Israelis have been intercepting our calls, even secure communications.” From there he extends it to the principals — the president, the vice president, the secretaries of state and defense, the national security adviser, their deputies and the Joint Chiefs — and answers his own question: “Of course they are. That’s why they’re ranked as critical threat for counter intelligence.”[4]
The episode sits alongside the induction briefing he received on his first day, in which the chief of security’s instruction was “you’re going to have to learn to keep your mouth shut” — and included the warning never to eat at a particular steakhouse near headquarters, because the Russians assumed CIA employees ate there and so, in the telling, “it’s all KGB, the whole restaurant.” Kiriakou says he never went.[5]