The 189 undeclared officers is a figure John Kiriakou traces to the briefing his intake class received from the CIA’s director of security on his first day at the agency — a talk he says has stuck in his mind for thirty-one years.[1][2]
The briefing was about counterintelligence, and its point was that the threat was not confined to “the usual cast of characters at the time — the Soviets, the Chinese, the Cubans.” The example chosen was Israel. The Israeli embassy in Washington had two declared intelligence officers, one from Mossad and one from Shin Bet — declared meaning “they came here and they said, hi, I’m a Mossad officer, I’m a Shin Bet officer, and I’m here to cooperate with you.”[3]
Against that, according to the FBI, the Israelis had “at least 189 undeclared intelligence officers at loose across the country, at universities and defense contractors and governmental organizations, stealing our secrets to take back to Israel.”[4]
The headquarters ban
Kiriakou gives the operational consequence as the measure of how bad the relationship was: “the Israelis were not allowed in CIA headquarters for liaison meetings. We had to meet them offsite somewhere, because they simply could not be trusted to not plant a bug or to try to recruit a CIA officer.”[5]
He draws a broader institutional attitude from it — “there was this real loathing of the Israelis at the CIA, but respect for the Palestinians” — and reports the same sympathy at the State Department, adding that it stops mattering when a decision moves to the White House, “because the White House is weighing political issues rather than just issues of what’s right and what’s wrong.”[5][6]
A second telling
Kiriakou gave the same briefing again during the 2026 Iran war, anchoring it to his first day at the agency — the day “you put your hand up in the air and you swear to uphold and protect the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic” — and to a talk by the CIA’s director of security.[7]
The structure is unchanged: two intelligence representatives at the Israeli embassy, one from Mossad and one from Shin Bet, against a far larger undeclared presence identified by the FBI — here given as “187 other undeclared Israeli intelligence officers spread out all across America working to steal secrets from American defense contractors.”[7] The two-count difference from his usual figure of 189 is a variation in the retelling; the attribution and the substance are identical.
What he adds in this version is the reason nothing follows from the count: “politically the relationship is so close that you don’t want to rock the boat and start arresting people spying for Israel.” His illustration is Jonathan Pollard.[8]