John Kiriakou: Israel’s Negative, Disproportionate and Widespread Influence on the U.S. National Security State
source/source2John Kiriakou is an author, journalist, former CIA officer specializing in the Middle East. He was the first U.S. government official to confirm in December 2007 that waterboarding and other forms of torture were used overseas to interrogate prisoners. He’s also the first CIA officer to be convicted for passing classified information to a reporter. He served a 30-month prison sentence for that. You can hear his voice on 105.5 FM in Washington, DC. Drive around and listen to him for four hours every day. His book, The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror, is a classic. Get the audio or print book. It’s phenomenal.
John Kiriakou: Thank you. Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you so much. I’m very happy to be here. I really am. What a wonderful organization.
I’m going to go back to 1990, my very first day at the CIA. We had a senior FBI agent come to talk to the new hire class. One of the things that he said has stuck in my mind all of these 32-plus years. We were talking about counterintelligence and the FBI’s role in counterintelligence. That is trying to spot spies who were spying on us, whether they’re moles, which is unusual, or intelligence officers of a foreign country.
Well, most embassies here in Washington have what are called declared officers. Those are foreign intelligence officers who are here and they are formally known to the FBI and the CIA as intelligence officers. So they’re here to exchange paper, and liaise, and meet with their CIA and FBI counterparts, and then go back to their embassies and write a report and send it back to their capitals.
This FBI agent told us at the time that the Israeli Embassy was unusual. Now, remember this was 32 years ago. So the information is very old, but just to give you an idea of what we were looking at. The Israeli Embassy had two declared officers, one from Shin Bet and one from Mossad. And it had 187 undeclared officers, that the FBI had been able to identify, spread out all across America in academia, in the defense contracting industry. We’ve all seen “The Americans.” Right? The Israelis do the same thing, just like we do the same thing (but not to Israel).
But we were told that very first day that I was at the agency that we have no international friends. Not really. I mean you can argue now of the Five Eyes, the British, the Australians, New Zealanders, the Canadians. Not the Israelis. The Israelis were a country, a service that we had to be leery of. In some cases, we had to fear. I thought that was probably an overstatement at the time.
After I had been at the CIA for three years, I decided I wanted to go overseas. There was a program that the State Department ran called the Analyst Overseas Program where they’ll take CIA analysts and transfer them to the State Department. So you’re a legitimate State Department Foreign Service Officer and you go overseas, and you work for two years in an embassy, and then come back and you transfer back to the CIA. So I thought, well, do I want to go to Jerusalem or do I want to go somewhere else? I decided to go to Bahrain—two of the happiest years in my life.
The guy that I sat next to for those three years, he went to Jerusalem along with his wife. Now, because they had been to Israel before, the CIA decided to declare them as a courtesy and to say, look, we have these two people, this married couple, they’re not spies, they’re analysts. One of them isn’t even really an analyst. He’s going to go to graduate school while his wife is doing the analysis. We just want you to know that they’re here as a courtesy, on assignment to the State Department.
What the Israelis did over the next two years was to carry out a campaign of harassment. The reason I bring this up is because it’s quite common. I’m telling you this story because this is just a normal thing that happens to Americans, especially to American CIA officers working and living in Israel.
They went to a party one night and they came home. It was a party at the ambassador’s residence in Tel Aviv. They came home and all of their living room furniture had been rearranged, all of it. So the message was we can come into your house any time we want and there’s nothing you can do about it. Okay. That’s aggravating a little bit, but no damage done.
The next time they went out, they came home and someone had defecated in all of the toilets in their house. They had a four-bedroom house, a four-bathroom house. People had gone to the bathroom in all four of the toilets and left it unflushed. So another not very nice message that we can harass you any time we want.
The third time it happened, they came home and their dog was yelping and laying on the floor of the kitchen. Someone had cut its tail off and then wrapped it in gauze and tape. The fourth time it happened to them, they had done their Christmas shopping. They had a tree up in the living room. They had gone to the ambassador’s Christmas party. When they came back all of the presents were gone. All of them, a thousand dollars’ worth of Christmas presents.
Now this kind of thing happens all the time. So the ambassador has to go to the Israelis and say, look, cut it out. Leave my people alone. And they say okay, okay. Then they’ll back off for a little while and then they start up again.
I have a friend who was the senior CIA person in-country [in Israel]. He went to work one day and the ambassador said to him the craziest thing happened last night. He said, I was in the car and my driver was driving me home. I had a blowout and we had to pull the car over to the side of the road. It turned out that two tires on the right side had blown out. Well, they had been shot out.
Have any of you ever—I mean all of us had blown a tire. Have you ever blown two at the same time just minding your business driving down the highway? Well, sure enough these two men pulled up, [the ambassador said]. They were so friendly and so warm. They got out and they helped us change the one tire. Then they stayed there until the tow truck came to help us tow the car to get the second tire replaced.
But then the ambassador’s briefcase was missing and in the briefcase were personnel files because he was writing end-of-year performance evaluations. Well, that way the friendly guys who stopped to help change the tire can determine who’s getting a performance evaluation from the ambassador and who’s not. Because the ones who aren’t are CIA officers, right? Because it’s the Foreign Service people who were working for the ambassador.
So we don’t do things like this to the Israelis ever. We also don’t spy on the Israelis ever because of the political pressure that would put the CIA under on Capitol Hill.
All the years that I worked at the CIA and being an analyst working on Iraq, an enemy country at the time, I was declared to—my God—more foreign intelligence services than I can even remember. It was dozens, dozens of them. I only spoke to the Israelis once in the 15 years that I was there. I had only been on the job about six months and I was told by my boss you’re going to brief the Israelis this afternoon. I said okay. And he said we don’t meet with them here in the building. We can’t trust them to come into the building, so we’re going to meet them out. There’s a special place where we meet them because they kept trying to bring bugs into the building. Right? Oh, we’ll give you this gift. Well, the gift weighs twice what it should because it’s full of batteries and a listening device. You can’t bring that in here.
So I went to brief the Israelis. Now, because I was the junior most analyst at the time—and it was like seven or eight of us that were there—I was the last one to speak. So we went around the table. It was the Mossad person and the Shin Bet person and they’re writing down every word that the analysts were saying. Finally they came to me and because I was not undercover, I was an overt employee at the time, I used my real name. I said my name is John Kiriakou. The Shin Bet officer says to me, spell it. So I spelled it for him. He looks up and he says, you are Jewish? I said I am not recruitable, and he stopped. Afterwards my boss said, yeah, you’re not going to brief the Israelis anymore. And so I didn’t. I never spoke to them again.
Now, once I got overseas, again, I was declared to so many services. I was working in counterterrorism and that’s where you really want there to be lots and lots of cooperation. So we would get calls from this country, and that country, and the other country and we rarely said no. Well, I can tell you from firsthand experience, when it came time to work with the Palestinians, I’m hard pressed to think of a group of people who were more committed to counterterrorism, to peace. I mean it was revelatory for me. It was a group of people who wanted to do the right thing. They wanted good relations. They wanted progress for their people. They wanted to have a role in the international community and it was a joy to work with them.
That was the case at the CIA and it was also the case at the State Department. There was a note that I wrote to myself to be sure to explain the dichotomy, that it was exactly the opposite at the White House and on Capitol Hill because we didn’t have to answer to voters at the CIA. Right? I don’t care what AIPAC says about me if I’m at the CIA. I don’t care. I have a job to do and I was bound to do it.
The State Department was the same way. And the State Department was often criticized for something called clientitis. You hear this a lot at the State Department, that people go to Israel and they serve for a couple of years. Then they come out really disliking the Israelis and really loving Palestinians. Then they say, okay, well, then you need to go to Berlin for a couple years to cool off. We can’t have all these Arab lovers. Well, it turns out that the whole State Department loves Arabs. It’s just a completely different world. It’s hard to describe.Then you go to the White House, especially to the National Security Council, to work with those people who have these fancy titles of senior assistant to the president for such and such affairs and assistant to the president. You say this is the way things should be in our policy on, you know, the Levant or the Maghreb or whatever it is. And they don’t want to hear it because you like Arabs too much.
I want to answer these questions in the little time that I have left. One is about Chas Freeman. Why in my view was Chas Freeman not able to bring his immense talent to office [as head of the National Intelligence Council] during the Obama administration? I worked for Chas Freeman in Riyadh when he was the American ambassador to Saudi Arabia. I was blessed over the course of my career with working with some of the most brilliant diplomatic minds anybody could encounter. He was one of them.
He’s a giant in diplomacy, and an honest giant. The easy answer to this question is AIPAC simply would not allow him to assume this position. This is a guy who had been ambassador to Saudi Arabia, [the main interpreter for President Richard Nixon during his 1972 visit] to China. He was the [Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs]. He’s published extensively. He’s a brilliant author, a historian.
President Barack Obama [nominated him] as [head of the National Intelligence Council]. And the Israelis said, oh, no, you don’t. He’s pro-Palestinian. And that fight lasted for [a month] as he waited for confirmation. Finally, on Capitol Hill, senators told the White House there’s no way we’re going to confirm him. If the Israelis say no, he’s not getting the job. And he didn’t. He didn’t.
Have any of you ever—I mean all of us had blown a tire. Have you ever blown two at the same time just minding your business driving down the highway? Well, sure enough these two men pulled up, [the ambassador said]. They were so friendly and so warm. They got out and they helped us change the one tire. Then they stayed there until the tow truck came to help us tow the car to get the second tire replaced.
But then the ambassador’s briefcase was missing and in the briefcase were personnel files because he was writing end-of-year performance evaluations. Well, that way the friendly guys who stopped to help change the tire can determine who’s getting a performance evaluation from the ambassador and who’s not. Because the ones who aren’t are CIA officers, right? Because it’s the Foreign Service people who were working for the ambassador.
So we don’t do things like this to the Israelis ever. We also don’t spy on the Israelis ever because of the political pressure that would put the CIA under on Capitol Hill.
All the years that I worked at the CIA and being an analyst working on Iraq, an enemy country at the time, I was declared to—my God—more foreign intelligence services than I can even remember. It was dozens, dozens of them. I only spoke to the Israelis once in the 15 years that I was there. I had only been on the job about six months and I was told by my boss you’re going to brief the Israelis this afternoon. I said okay. And he said we don’t meet with them here in the building. We can’t trust them to come into the building, so we’re going to meet them out. There’s a special place where we meet them because they kept trying to bring bugs into the building. Right? Oh, we’ll give you this gift. Well, the gift weighs twice what it should because it’s full of batteries and a listening device. You can’t bring that in here.
So I went to brief the Israelis. Now, because I was the junior most analyst at the time—and it was like seven or eight of us that were there—I was the last one to speak. So we went around the table. It was the Mossad person and the Shin Bet person and they’re writing down every word that the analysts were saying. Finally they came to me and because I was not undercover, I was an overt employee at the time, I used my real name. I said my name is John Kiriakou. The Shin Bet officer says to me, spell it. So I spelled it for him. He looks up and he says, you are Jewish? I said I am not recruitable, and he stopped. Afterwards my boss said, yeah, you’re not going to brief the Israelis anymore. And so I didn’t. I never spoke to them again.
Now, once I got overseas, again, I was declared to so many services. I was working in counterterrorism and that’s where you really want there to be lots and lots of cooperation. So we would get calls from this country, and that country, and the other country and we rarely said no. Well, I can tell you from firsthand experience, when it came time to work with the Palestinians, I’m hard pressed to think of a group of people who were more committed to counterterrorism, to peace. I mean it was revelatory for me. It was a group of people who wanted to do the right thing. They wanted good relations. They wanted progress for their people. They wanted to have a role in the international community and it was a joy to work with them.
That was the case at the CIA and it was also the case at the State Department. There was a note that I wrote to myself to be sure to explain the dichotomy, that it was exactly the opposite at the White House and on Capitol Hill because we didn’t have to answer to voters at the CIA. Right? I don’t care what AIPAC says about me if I’m at the CIA. I don’t care. I have a job to do and I was bound to do it.
The State Department was the same way. And the State Department was often criticized for something called clientitis. You hear this a lot at the State Department, that people go to Israel and they serve for a couple of years. Then they come out really disliking the Israelis and really loving Palestinians. Then they say, okay, well, then you need to go to Berlin for a couple years to cool off. We can’t have all these Arab lovers. Well, it turns out that the whole State Department loves Arabs. It’s just a completely different world. It’s hard to describe.Then you go to the White House, especially to the National Security Council, to work with those people who have these fancy titles of senior assistant to the president for such and such affairs and assistant to the president. You say this is the way things should be in our policy on, you know, the Levant or the Maghreb or whatever it is. And they don’t want to hear it because you like Arabs too much.
I want to answer these questions in the little time that I have left. One is about Chas Freeman. Why in my view was Chas Freeman not able to bring his immense talent to office [as head of the National Intelligence Council] during the Obama administration? I worked for Chas Freeman in Riyadh when he was the American ambassador to Saudi Arabia. I was blessed over the course of my career with working with some of the most brilliant diplomatic minds anybody could encounter. He was one of them.
He’s a giant in diplomacy, and an honest giant. The easy answer to this question is AIPAC simply would not allow him to assume this position. This is a guy who had been ambassador to Saudi Arabia, [the main interpreter for President Richard Nixon during his 1972 visit] to China. He was the [Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs]. He’s published extensively. He’s a brilliant author, a historian.
President Barack Obama [nominated him] as [head of the National Intelligence Council]. And the Israelis said, oh, no, you don’t. He’s pro-Palestinian. And that fight lasted for [a month] as he waited for confirmation. Finally, on Capitol Hill, senators told the White House there’s no way we’re going to confirm him. If the Israelis say no, he’s not getting the job. And he didn’t. He didn’t.