The counterintelligence report that stopped is John Kiriakou’s account of a recurring FBI product that ranked the states doing the most damage to the United States through espionage, and of how it came to an end.
The ranking
Kiriakou introduced it on a televised panel, in the middle of a dispute over whether Israel spies on the United States, as the evidence he considered dispositive because it was the American government’s own. “Jeff Stein, the great Intelligence Beat reporter from Newsweek, would report every year on an intelligence report that the FBI would put out about the worst counter intelligence threats in the United States. And it was Russia, China, and Israel.”[1]
He restated the placement precisely: the Israelis were “alleged by the FBI counter intelligence division to be the most damaging spies in America only after our supposed adversaries Russia and China.”[1]
How it ended
What Kiriakou draws attention to is not the finding but its disappearance. “eventually what happened was it it caused such a scandal after time after time of this coming out that Diane Feinstein ended up changing the rules so that they didn’t have to issue the report anymore. So that Jeff Stein wouldn’t be able to report on it anymore.”[1]
In his telling the sequence runs scandal, then rule change, then silence — the assessment was never publicly contested, only made to stop being written. He offers no date for the change and does not say which rules were altered.
The episode sits alongside his other claims about the collection relationship: the officer count at the hundred and eighty-seven Israeli officers, and the prohibition he says ran the other way at the Israelis were off limits. Dianne Feinstein appears elsewhere in his account of the Senate torture report, in a role he treats far more favourably.