Iran Nuclear Assessment
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John Kiriakou has stated his assessment that the US-Israeli military campaign against Iran was a war of choice driven by Israeli political pressure rather than by genuine intelligence indicating an Iranian nuclear weapons threat. He has described two National Intelligence Estimates contradicting that threat assessment, the CIA's structural intelligence gap on Iran, and what he characterized as the nuclear-deterrence paradox underlying the conflict.

The intelligence record

The National Intelligence Estimates

Kiriakou stated that the CIA produced two National Intelligence Estimates, the highest-level publication of the U.S. intelligence community, both concluding that Iran did not have a nuclear weapons program; he says both times the process concluded with the unanimous verdict of all 18 U.S. intelligence services that Iran had no nuclear weapons program.

He has given the same account repeatedly and with increasing specificity. On National Security Files in July 2026 he said the community-wide assessment is not a close call: two separate estimates, one in 2003, one "like 2009, something like that", concluded on the coordinated agreement of all eighteen U.S. intelligence agencies that Iran did not have a nuclear-weapons programme. His 2026 summary elsewhere is that the record was never ambiguous: "The entire US intelligence community, not just the CIA, but all 18 members of the US intelligence community wrote two national intelligence estimates. Both concluding unanimously that the Iranians did not have a nuclear weapons program." In other tellings he counts three: he said three separate CIA National Intelligence Estimates concluded definitively that Iran was not seeking to develop a nuclear weapon, only enriching to a higher level than before while keeping its options open.

Why the finding did not hold, on his account, is political rather than evidentiary, "But that narrative didn't serve of Israeli interests", followed by Netanyahu repeating the case to successive presidents until one accepted it. He dates the modern "six months from a nuclear weapon" Israeli talking-point on Iran to 1986 and treats it as a claim continuously falsified for forty years; elsewhere he says Israel has claimed Iran was "six weeks away" from a nuclear bomb since 1985, calling that Israeli propaganda.

Khamenei's fatwa

Kiriakou pairs the estimates with a religious prohibition. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei had issued a fatwa, which Kiriakou dates to around 2003, forbidding the creation of such a program because it was un-Islamic. He treats it as the doctrinal reason Iran had not enriched to weapons-grade levels. In one telling the prohibition carries a penalty: the late Ayatollah Khamenei issued a fatwa holding that building a nuclear weapon was a sin, and that to build one would be punishable by death. In another he gives the date and the conclusion together: "in 2003, Ayatollah Khamenei, the the late Ayatollah Khamenei, um issued a fatwa in 2003 declaring it a sin to develop a nuclear weapon. There was no Iranian nuclear weapon or nuclear weapons program, period."

Enrichment, and what weapons-grade would require

Iran was enriching uranium, in his telling, but for medical research and nuclear power and while negotiating with Russia and China on a nuclear reactor, not to anything approaching weapons-grade levels. He separately noted that the CIA has consistently published national intelligence estimates saying Khamenei ended what had been a weapons program in 2003, and that Iran has not had one for the 22 years since, even as enrichment purity rose under pressure from 9% to 35% to 67%, with weapons-grade requiring the 90s.

The capability argument follows: "if the Iranians wanted to be a nuclear power, they would have been a nuclear power years ago. It's not that hard." And the intelligence has been consistent, "the CIA has repeatedly concluded that the Iranians are not seeking a nuclear weapon. There's no evidence at all."

The JCPOA and its collapse

The inspection regime

Kiriakou describes the JCPOA, the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, as a good and functioning agreement modeled on the UN weapons-inspection procedures used against Saddam Hussein's Iraq, including unannounced spot inspections, lead seals, and live-feed cameras to Vienna, working right up until Trump withdrew the U.S. from it.

He has drawn the equivalence explicitly: the deal the United States had with Iran under the JCPOA, and the deal the United Nations had, were identical to the terms the International Atomic Energy Agency had negotiated with Saddam Hussein's Iraq for observation of its weapons programmes, lead seals on every door, cameras, and spot inspections with no warning and no coordination. The Iranians had agreed to all of it.

Trump's withdrawal and the secondary sanctions

He says Trump tore up the deal within the first couple of weeks of his first term, claiming it made America weak and that he could negotiate a better one. Kiriakou explains that after Obama negotiated the JCPOA, opening trade between the U.S. and Iran as well as the UK, France, Germany, Switzerland, and Japan, Trump's unilateral withdrawal triggered U.S. secondary-sanctions law, which then threatened to sanction the same allies for continuing to trade with Iran exactly as the deal had directed them to.

After the withdrawal, Iran resumed enriching uranium up to 67 percent, short of the roughly 90-95 percent required for weapons grade. He says the Trump administration proposed that Iran could keep enriching to 67 percent so long as the material were stored in the UAE, since Oman, willing to facilitate talks, declined to be the repository, and that Iran rejected the proposal.

Iran chose the treaty

The point Kiriakou says American media never carries is that Iran's non-proliferation obligations were voluntary. "Iran never lost a war. They didn't do anything wrong. They're not being sanctioned because they screwed up somehow." After the revolution they chose to maintain the Non-Proliferation Treaty, "They didn't have to. They could have said, 'We just had a revolution. We overthrew the old government. Old treaties are bye-bye,'" as he notes leaders do without the excuse of a revolution.

A war of choice

"Please bomb Iran"

Kiriakou characterized the U.S. entry into conflict with Iran as the result of decades of pressure from Israeli Prime Ministers. In his description, every Israeli Prime Minister since the 1980s had come to Washington and, regardless of which president was in office, made the same request: "Please bomb Iran. Please bomb Iran. Please bomb Iran." Every president refused, until, in Kiriakou's assessment, the current one was susceptible to that pressure.

He argued that Israeli national interests do not necessarily coincide with American national interests, and that if Israel has a problem with Iran, that is for Israel to resolve: "I think it's high time that we start acting in the best interests of the United States, rather than in the best interests of Israel."

"Word for word the Israeli list of demands"

In January 2026, with Trump threatening an attack "with speed and violence," three demands were on the table from Washington and the Europeans: an end to uranium enrichment and the surrender of all existing stockpiles; limits on the range and number of ballistic missiles; and an end to support for Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis. Kiriakou notes in passing that the missile demand concerns medium-range weapons, "they don't have long range."

Asked who wrote the list, Kiriakou's answer is unhesitating: "I can tell you exactly who came up with that list, and his name is Benjamin Netanyahu. That is quite literally word for word the Israeli list of demands for the Iranians. Now, like magic, all of a sudden it's the American list of demands to the letter."

The domestic analogy offered, lobbyists handing a congressman bill text he pastes in and submits as legislation, is one he endorses as exact, and his verdict on it is "that's corrupt... there's not even a pretense of decency here."

On the merits, he would negotiate differently. The missiles would be off the table, "you got to protect yourself... it's a real country", on the general principle that you should not "ask for things that your adversary can't possibly agree to." The proxy demand he calls "completely unenforceable," and asks whether the United States intends to stop backing its own proxies in the region. Enrichment alone he considers discussable, while noting the controversy was created by the withdrawal from a deal that was working.

The Joint Chiefs, and who advises the president

Kiriakou stated that, in his experience, the people most opposed to war are the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, those who have seen combat are the least willing to enter it again. He stated that President Trump fired all the generals on the Joint Chiefs and replaced them with hand-picked individuals willing to accept Israeli intelligence and proceed to war with Iran.

He also cited a Wall Street Journal reporter who asked Trump who his closest advisor was on politico-military issues. Trump's answer: "I don't have an advisor. I just trust my gut." Kiriakou called this "very, very dangerous."

What filled the vacuum, on his reading, was the company the president kept. Kiriakou assessed that Trump had been fundamentally shaped by constant exposure to Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth: "When Marco Rubio is both Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, and you're speaking to him every day, and you're speaking to Pete Hegseth every day, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs you named because of his complete loyalty to you, you're going to essentially turn into John McCain."

The intelligence gap, and who filled it

A denied area

Kiriakou described the CIA as having a demonstrably weak human-intelligence posture inside Iran, what he called a "denied area." The absence of an American Embassy in Tehran since 1979 means CIA officers cannot operate under diplomatic cover, and cannot approach Iranian government officials for recruitment in the conventional way. The agency has consequently become dependent on liaison intelligence, which in practice means MOSSAD.

MOSSAD and the MEK

In his description, MOSSAD excels at targeting intelligence: they recruit Afghan refugees inside Iran for approximately ten dollars a month to report on the locations of generals and nuclear scientists, providing the coordinates needed for cruise-missile targeting. However, the day-to-day operational and policy intelligence on the Iranian government comes from Iranian Jews living in the West and from the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK).

Kiriakou described the MEK as having been listed on the State Department's international terrorist organizations list through the Obama administration. The group had murdered an American ambassador in Tehran in the 1970s and attempted to murder an American general in the same decade. It was removed from the terrorist list and is now receiving Israeli funding. Kiriakou's characterization: the MEK has a direct vested interest in the United States going to war with Iran because they want to take power there. Their intelligence therefore cannot be treated as disinterested.

He traces the flawed war analysis to those sources directly, "either the Israelis or the MEK", neither of which, in his view, can be relied upon for objective intelligence on Iran.

Conduct of the war

Reading the carriers

Kiriakou stated that the single most reliable indicator of American military intent is naval positioning. His formulation: if the United States deploys one aircraft-carrier strike group with eleven or twelve associated vessels, an attack is likely. If two strike groups are deployed, an attack is certain. He told contacts in the Persian Gulf, where he spent time in Kuwait and Dubai/Abu Dhabi in the weeks before the war began, that yes, he believed the United States would attack.

The girls' school

John Kiriakou stated that the United States bombed a girls' elementary school in southern Iran on the first day of the war, killing 175 people. He described video released by Iranian media outlet Mehr News showing the precise moment of impact, with slow-motion footage indicating the projectile was most probably a Tomahawk missile.

Kiriakou stated that his analytical training would not permit him to conclude this was an accident. His assessment: "Either we did this on purpose or the Israelis did it on purpose, to traumatize the Iranian people, to take the fight right out of them." He added that Donald Trump had genuinely believed the Iranian government would collapse like a house of cards upon the first missile launch, that Iranians would dance in the streets, and that Trump would win the Nobel Peace Prize. Kiriakou characterized this as a belief held by Trump alone: "Anybody who follows these issues could have told him we would not be seen as liberators, we would be seen as invaders and occupiers."

Dimona, and the casualty blackout

Kiriakou described the Iranians as having proven "far tougher than anybody expected" and noted that the Iron Dome had proven less effective than anticipated. He reported that Iran had bombed Dimona, the Israeli facility where uranium is enriched for Israel's nuclear weapons program. He also stated that it was a crime in Israel, punishable by up to ten years in prison, to reveal any bomb damage assessment information, including the number of Israeli military and civilian casualties.

The suicide-drone strategy

Kiriakou described Iran's primary tactical response as a "cheap, plentiful, reliable" suicide-drone strategy, not missile launches, but explosives-laden drones crashed directly into targets and operated remotely. He estimated the cost at five to ten thousand dollars per unit for capable long-range versions. His characterization: "It's the future of warfare. It's something that the United States has not fully come to appreciate and understand, but the Iranians do."

Specific targets he identified: the US Air Force base outside Doha; the headquarters of the Fifth Fleet in Manama, Bahrain; the US Army base in Kuwait; and oil facilities in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia.

Why the collapse never came

"Like killing the Pope"

Kiriakou described the killing of Ayatollah Khamenei as analogous to killing the Pope: doing so would not bring down global Catholicism, because the institution simply selects a new Pope. He stated that Khamenei was 86 years old and would not have lived indefinitely, that succession had already been discussed within Iranian leadership, and that "there was never any possibility that Iran would just collapse because you killed an 86-year-old man." He characterized Trump's belief to the contrary as a fundamental intelligence failure, or, alternatively, as the result of receiving MOSSAD intelligence rather than CIA analysis.

He added: "I'm confident that Donald Trump's position that Iran would fall apart did not come from the CIA. With that said, he has so politicized analysis from the CIA that it's possible CIA analysts were afraid to tell the truth because they didn't want to lose their jobs." He confirmed that Trump was receiving intelligence from MOSSAD: "100%. Yes." He noted that Netanyahu had traveled to Washington seven times in eleven months.

The same premise failed for a second reason, the country itself. The Israelis convinced Trump "that the Iranian government was a house of cards", when "anybody who knows anything about Iran knew that that wasn't true." Iran, he notes, is the size of Western Europe, 3.8 times the size of Iraq, with a forbidding topography, "You can't just bomb Iran think it's going to fall apart and then your handpicked stooge comes in and just takes over and everybody lives happily ever after. That's a fantasy."

"We have to win to win"

Kiriakou stated the fundamental asymmetry: for the United States and Israel to win, they must completely topple the Iranian government and install a pro-American, pro-Israeli replacement, which he called "virtually impossible." For Iran to win, it only needs to survive: "That's it. If they can just survive this, they win." He connected this to the historical resilience demonstrated in the Iran-Iraq War, where Iran endured Iraqi aggression including chemical-weapons use against both Iranians and Kurds, and still could not be defeated.

He has put the same asymmetry as a formula: "We have to win to win", the United States must replace the Iranian government with one that is pro-American, pro-Western, perhaps even pro-Israel. "The Iranians just have to survive. Just survival is a win for them. So, we may have bitten off more than we could chew here." Stated plainly elsewhere: for the United States and Israel to 'win', they would need to see the collapse and replacement of the Iranian government.

The threat assessment

"Iran is not a threat"

John Kiriakou states as fact that Iran is not a threat to the United States: it lacks the weapons and the delivery systems to attack America, and is a threat only to Israel because Israel is a threat to it. He notes the CIA's own assessment is that Iran has not sought a nuclear weapon, but that if it did, it would be to deter Israel, which has "dozens" of its own, just as North Korea's bomb deters attack. Elsewhere he says flatly that Iran does not currently have a nuclear weapon or the delivery system to use one, undercutting Israeli claims that Iran poses an existential threat.

He also pushed back on the scale of the threat used to justify the war: Iran has killed Americans only in "single digits over the last several decades," and there has never been a Shiite-terrorism problem inside the United States in his lifetime, partly because it has always been hard for Iranians or Iranian proxies to obtain U.S. visas.

Sleeper cells, and the cell rumours

Kiriakou says Iran likely maintains some sleeper cells in the U.S., Canada, the UK, and France, though far fewer than in the 1980s, when Iran was much more active with sleeper cells and assassinated several former prime ministers and a former president, mostly in France. He says reports of Iranian sleeper-cell hit teams in U.S. cities from Chicago to Honolulu were fabricated by Netanyahu to shift American public opinion toward war. He dismissed post-conflict FBI rumors of Iranian "cells" in Honolulu and Detroit on the same reasoning: if such cells existed, authorities would arrest them rather than announce them.

He noted that Trump killed Qasem Soleimani in his first term and that Iran's non-response was labeled "strategic patience" by scholars, roughly 700,000 people attended Soleimani's funeral, yet Iran still did not retaliate militarily. He also states that Iran is not very active or influential in U.S. media and propaganda, noting the FBI seized the website of Iranian outlet PressTV.com around 2019, similar to its earlier seizure of the Venezuelan outlet Telesur's website.

Sanctions, and Iran's resilience

Kiriakou says a close Iranian-American friend who travels to Iran two or three times a year, sending him videos and photos along the way, has shown him that Iran lacks for nothing, with robust trade relations with Russia, India, and China; whatever Iran cannot buy from those countries after 46 years of sanctions, he says, it simply makes itself. He said in 2025 that Iran continued trading with the UK, the European Union, and Japan even after the U.S. pulled out of the JCPOA, and asked why anyone should expect Iran to upset that arrangement.

Forgotten precedent: Iran Air Flight 655

Kiriakou notes that Americans have largely forgotten that the US shot down an Iranian civilian airliner during the George H.W. Bush administration, killing almost 300 people, after which the US said only "our bad, on radar it looked like a military jet," even though civilian flight schedules are public information. He raises the episode as part of the deeper mistrust shaping Iran's read of American intentions.

The deterrence paradox

Kiriakou described a dinner conversation with several full professors who serve as paid Pentagon advisors. These individuals expressed genuine concern that Israel might use a nuclear weapon as a last resort if the United States withdrew from the conflict, leaving Israel alone against Iran.

One of the professors articulated what Kiriakou called a fascinating response to the broader deterrence question. He noted that North Korea does not appear in these conversations, because North Korea has a nuclear weapon and therefore no one will attack it. His conclusion: "The only reason that the United States and Israel attacked Iran is because they didn't yet have a nuclear weapon. If they had, there would have been no war, because that would have been the deterrent."

Kiriakou relayed this without endorsement but noted the internal logic: the very absence of a weapon was the condition that made the attack possible.

He stated his view that if the United States allowed Israel to use a nuclear weapon, or used one itself, "that's going to be the end of the American Empire." He cited a satirical Onion headline: "Chinese happy to sit back and watch US destroy itself." He characterized this as capturing what he believed was actually occurring.

Costs to the United States

An unreliable negotiating partner

Kiriakou stated as a matter of record that the United States had attacked Iran during the course of negotiations, more than once, in the nine months preceding the interview. His characterization: "We pretend to negotiate and then in the midst of the negotiations we just launch military attacks." He assessed that Iran had correctly concluded the United States was not a reliable partner and had stopped viewing negotiation as the goal.

He has put the conclusion more briefly: the United States cannot be trusted to lead talks with Iran, while acknowledging that the US had talks with Iran on its nuclear program.

The budget, the debt, and the dollar

Kiriakou described the US defense budget as having reached one trillion dollars, larger than the next nine countries combined, while American airports, hospitals, roads, and bridges were at third-world levels. He noted that Trump had previously called for a fifty-percent Pentagon budget cut (which Kiriakou said he celebrated and wrote an op-ed about) before reversing and proposing an additional half-trillion in spending. He stated that interest payments on the national debt would within a few years become the single largest government expenditure. He also identified the BRICS unified currency, not imminent, but eventual, as a structural threat to dollar dominance and the petrodollar.

The argument from what has not happened

Asked in April 2024 whether Iran would take the gloves off and build a weapon, Kiriakou answered "in my heart I think no, because there''s no upside for Iran. It will open Iran to any number of attacks and lifelong sanctions", while allowing that it is "probably something that the United States and the West ought to prepare for."

His positive case rests on Iranian judgement rather than Iranian restraint. "I think we underestimate the Iranians'' intelligence, in that I think that they''ve concluded that they don''t really need a nuclear weapons program. It would be too much of a risk for them, and it would be incredibly expensive." The evidence he offers is the road not taken: "if they really wanted to have a nuclear weapon they would have it by now. They could have certainly purchased the technology from the North Koreans or from the Pakistanis, and they haven''t done that."

After the strikes: the case for a deterrent

By October 2025 Kiriakou had stopped framing the question as whether Iran should be permitted a programme and started framing it as what deterrence requires. "I don't blame the Iranians for wanting to build a nuclear weapons program. They have to protect themselves. And if they're going to be constantly attacked by Israel, constantly bombed by Israel, then they're going to have to create a deterrent that is big enough, that is strong enough, to really deter the Israelis."

He adds a proliferation route without asserting it as fact: "maybe they don't have to start from scratch. Maybe they get help from the Pakistanis or from the North Koreans. Who knows?" He expects another attack regardless, and hopes the Iranians "continue to be as patient as they have been so far."

The treaty argument

Kiriakou's case for Iranian withdrawal from the Non-Proliferation Treaty is one of reciprocity rather than of rights. "If I were the president of Iran, I would pull out of the NPT. What good has the NPT done for me, if the Israelis aren't members? They haven't acceded to the NPT, so why should Iran?"

The deterrent conclusion follows directly: "if the Israelis have nuclear weapons and they're pointed at Iran, how do the Iranians protect themselves? The only way you can protect yourself is to develop your own nuclear weapons."

He pairs it with an observation about the diplomatic effect of Israeli strikes, put in Trump's voice: "these Israelis are embarrassing me, because we keep telling them we want to talk to the Iranians, and every time they bomb Iran, the Iranians cancel the talks."

The North Korea comparison

Kiriakou puts the deterrence point as an omission from the news agenda. "We're not talking about North Korea today, and there's a reason why we're not talking about North Korea: because North Korea has a nuclear weapon. And so nobody wants to mess with North Korea. Well, the Iranians weren't building a nuclear weapon."

The evidence he cites is documentary and religious: "there are two CIA national intelligence estimates that concluded that there was no nuclear weapons programme, besides the fact that Ayatollah Khamenei issued a fatwa decades ago saying there will be no nuclear weapons programme."

Against that, "Benjamin Netanyahu came to the United States dozens upon dozens of times to try to convince whoever happened to be president at the time, and we're going back four or five presidents, that Iran was an existential threat, and that there was indeed a nuclear programme, and so Iran had to be destroyed. Well, that was a lie. And now here we are in a hot war, wondering how we're going to get out of it."

See also

- Israeli Nuclear Program
- MOSSAD
- AIPAC
- Glenn-Symington Act
