The hundred and eighty-seven Israeli officers is a figure John Kiriakou uses to characterise the scale of Israeli intelligence activity inside the United States at the start of his own career. He gave it on a televised panel alongside Alan Dershowitz and a former Mossad director, in answer to a question about why he is not an admirer of the service.
The count
Kiriakou began from what he calls the ordinary business of any service: “the job of really any traditional intelligence service is to recruit spies to steal secrets. And that’s great because every country’s leaders need those secrets in order to form the best possible policy.” His objection is to the target set — secrets “being stolen from the US, the major US defense contractors, from Capitol Hill, from the US intelligence community, from the State Department.”[1]
The figure follows. “I remember when I first joined the CIA and this is going back 35 years. There was a declared Mossad officer in the Israeli embassy and a declared Shin Bet officer and the FBI was able to identify 187 additional Israeli intelligence officers at work in the United States clandestinely.”[2]
The redundancy objection
What he says he could never account for was the point of the effort. “I would say why why would they steal secrets when we give them 99% of everything that we already have?”[3]
Put to him on the same panel that the United States surely steals secrets from Israel in return, Kiriakou refused the symmetry outright — a claim treated separately under the Israelis were off limits. Dershowitz did not accept the denial, and the exchange ran on without resolution.[3][4]
Kiriakou has said elsewhere that stating this in public carries a professional cost; that pattern is recorded at the anti-semite smear.