Israel’s Negative, Disproportionate and Widespread Influence

John Kirakou at The National Press Club ([screenshot])

John Kiriakou, ex-CIA and whistleblower who exposed U.S. torture tactics, & served prison time for it, speaks on Palestine, Israel, and covert CIA operations.

By John Kirakou, Reposted from Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March 13, 2022

2022 May Conference Issue

Grant F. Smith: John Kiriakou is an author, journalist, and 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.

We’ve asked him to talk about a few points he witnessed within the CIA. According to him, in his own words, there was a great deal of respect for Palestinians. But we’re asking him, is that respect open or suppressed? He received many warnings regarding covert Israeli intelligence maneuvers in the U.S. So we’re asking him, oh, really? That sounds interesting. What were those? And he’s been noted for refusing to undertake the CIA’s enhanced interrogation training—waterboarding, sleep deprivation—that was used on terrorist suspects.

So we’d like to know what he thinks about reports that the CIA justified and adopted some techniques based on Israel. We’ve asked him a few questions including the good guy/bad guy motif that we’re hearing once again and whether the U.S. could be sucked into a war with Iran. Please welcome John Kiriakou.

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. A great event. It’s not a normal thing, really, in Washington that you’re able to get together with a group of like-minded individuals and speak freely. It’s very nice.

I’d like to do this in two parts if I may. I want to talk first, a little bit, about my background at the CIA and the way the CIA views human rights, which is going to seem odd, I think, to most of you. Then I’d like to answer these specific questions that we were just talking about.

First of all, I joined the CIA in January of 1990. I was recruited into the CIA by my graduate school adviser, who was not really a grad school adviser so much as he was undercover as a grad school adviser. He recruited me into the CIA. I spent the first seven-and-a-half years of my career working on and in the Middle East, almost exclusively on Iraq. I worked for a while on Kuwait. I went into Kuwait with the Marines on Liberation Day in 1991. Very exciting.

But it got monotonous after a little while writing papers that you knew nobody was going to read. We all thought we were so important, but nobody paid any attention. So I decided to do something more exciting and more rewarding. I got involved in counterterrorism operations. As it turned out, I was the only person in the entire CIA who spoke both Greek and Arabic. So they sent me to Athens to work on Arab—it’s quaint now—Arab communist terrorist groups.

You remember the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Abu Nidal? They were all old men by the time I got there; it became nonsensical. But, anyway, it was a lot of fun, and I got to sort of learn the tradecraft. Then I went back to headquarters in 2000 after ten years mostly in the field. Then September 11th hit. September 11th changed literally everything at the CIA.

“The CIA Underwent Something Called a Cull”

When Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, he was inaugurated, of course, in January of 1993. The CIA underwent something called a cull. We were ordered to go through the files of literally every recruited asset we had in the world. If those assets had any human rights problems in their past, we were ordered to cut ties with them, to fire them. A lot of us laughed when we heard that because can you imagine the CIA saying, Oops, you were involved in a human rights abuse five years ago, we can’t have anything to do with you. But by God, they actually did. Bill Clinton was serious at the time about human rights. We culled a third, fully a third of the recruited assets that the CIA had around the world. That only lasted about seven years. Then George W. Bush became president, September 11th happened, and everything changed overnight.

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 we were told that very first day that I was at the agency that we had no international friends. Not really. I mean you can argue now of the Five Eyes, the British, the Australians, the New Zealanders, and 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 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 that 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 and a four-bathroom house. People had gone to the bathroom in all four of the toilets and left them 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 lying 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 was 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 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.

You know, that was between 1998 and 2000. And I thought, wow, that was really great. I wonder if that was an anomaly. Then I went to Pakistan in 2002 as the chief of counterterrorism operations. It got to the point where the Palestinians would come to the embassy, and they would just wave them in, come on in, because they belonged there. We were partners. We were a team.

CIA and State Department vs White House and Capitol Hill

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 the Palestinians. Then they say, okay, well, then you need to go to Berlin for a couple of 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.

Well, with that said, we all just accepted it. Frankly, we all believed that we were right and the White House was wrong. Capitol Hill, forget it. It’s a lost cause. On Capitol Hill, when we were summoned to give briefings, we would get in the car with somebody from the Office of Congressional Affairs and they would always tell us before we walk into the House or Senate office buildings: Remember, say as little as you can possibly get away with and try not to answer the questions. Yeah, that’s what we would do. Just don’t answer the questions. You can talk, and talk, and talk, and not really say anything. Then those senators and congressmen just get up and walk away anyway. So it never made any difference.

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 the 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 that 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.

Now, in the different groups that we have around town, we’ve honored him in other ways. His health is quite poor right now. But he was wronged by his country. He was wronged just because he believed in a level playing field, something that I got to see a lot of here in Washington over the years.

I’ve been noted for refusing to undertake the CIA’s enhanced interrogation training on terrorist suspects. I called it a torture program. I had just returned from Pakistan, where I had led this raid that resulted in the capture of Abu Zubaydah, who’s in the news today because he lost his final case at the Supreme Court yesterday.

I was asked if I wanted to be trained in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques. I had never heard the term before, and so I asked what it meant. My colleague said very excitedly, we’re going to start getting rough with these guys. And I said, well, what does that mean? He explained it to me. I said that sounds like a torture program. Are you crazy? And he said, no, it’s not a torture program. The president said we could do it, and the Justice Department approved it. I said, I don’t know, man, that sounds like a torture program. I don’t think I want to have anything to do with it. I said I have a moral and ethical problem with it.

So I’m embarrassed to tell you that of the 14 people who were asked, I was the only one who said no. And these were the people that I traveled with. Our wives were friends, and our kids played together. They were normal people to me. It was a shock that they could turn it off and become monsters when they had to. Murderers in cold blood.

This final question is, did we learn this from the Israelis? Of course, we did. We saw what the Israelis were getting away with in these prisons that they had in the West Bank and in Gaza. Nobody raised any objection at all. So we thought, well, if the Israelis can do it, we can do it. The president said we could, and the Justice Department said we could, and so we did.

Now, of course, we have to take the CIA’s word for it. They say they’re not doing it anymore. We don’t know. And my time is up. So, thank you so much for this opportunity. It was wonderful. Thank you.

John Kiriakou is an author, journalist, and 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.

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