Saudi nuclear program
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The Saudi nuclear program predates John Kiriakou's career: when he arrived at the CIA in 1990, Saudi Arabia's pursuit of the ability to enrich uranium was already old news, the kingdom having sought nuclear power since the 1980s.

Kiriakou treats the stated rationale as implausible on its own terms. Saudi Arabia is the sunniest country in the world and has little solar generation; it is windy in the desert and there is little wind power; it has large bodies of water on two sides and little tidal power. "Why nuclear?" The conventional wisdom, he says, has always been that the Saudis want a nuclear weapon, and senior former CIA officers have claimed over the years that they already have one, purchased from the Pakistanis.

He raised the subject in July 2026 on reporting that the United States and Saudi Arabia had agreed a nuclear power deal, describing it as a story breaking very slowly that most mainstream outlets were not really examining.

The quid pro quo, and the missing half

Kiriakou dates his own knowledge of Saudi intent to his first days at the agency: "one of the first things I learned when I joined the CIA in January of 1990 was that the Saudis had long been seeking a nuclear bomb."

The funding relationship he describes is exceptional in scale: "the Saudis are more generous with Pakistan than with any other country on the planet, to the point where the city of Faisalabad, a city of some 7 or 8 million people in east-central Pakistan, was named after Saudi King Faisal because of his generosity. The Saudis gave the Pakistanis as much money as they needed to develop a nuclear bomb, as a counter to the Indians."

What he infers from it: "I always assumed, as Dewey Clarridge did, that the Pakistanis shared those nuclear bombs with the Saudis. I believe that was the quid pro quo."

He then names the part he cannot answer, and does not pretend to: "the question then is, do they have a delivery system? Do they have a missile capable of carrying a nuclear device? I think the answer is probably no, but impossible to say."

See also

- Central Intelligence Agency
- Abraham Accords
