Piers Morgan
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Piers Morgan is the British broadcaster whose panel show became a recurring, and combative, venue for John Kiriakou in 2025.

The Dershowitz smackdowns

Kiriakou describes the marquee bout as "the equivalent of a WWE Smackdown with Alan Dershowitz", four panelists, with Kiriakou and Scott Horton ("absolutely brilliant... I wish my brain could work" like his) on one side, Dershowitz and former Mossad chief Moshe Yaalon on the other.

The flashpoint was Israeli espionage. When Kiriakou said the Israelis spy on the United States, Yaalon denied it; Morgan pressed, and the general answered that the spying stopped when Jonathan Pollard got caught and the prime minister forbade it. Kiriakou's reply: "General, with all due respect, that's just simply not true. I joined the CIA in 1990..." In another exchange, Morgan asked whether Israel has nuclear weapons, the general only smiled. And when Kiriakou said he believed Jeffrey Epstein was an Israeli access agent, the Mossad chief chuckled, a reaction Kiriakou reads as telling. He got into "a little tiff" with Dershowitz, who he believes lashed out from anger.

Describing a later appearance alongside Dershowitz and a retired Israeli general he names as Danny Ayalon, Kiriakou recalls arguing that Israel is "prolific in their espionage work in the United States, especially as it relates to American defense contractors," until Morgan cut Dershowitz off and put the question to the general directly. The answer, Kiriakou says, was a laugh and a formula: "My position is whatever the prime minister's position is." Morgan then asked whether Israel has nuclear weapons and received the same construction, the prime minister has not confirmed it, so the general would go with what the prime minister says. Kiriakou treats the repetition as its own answer on both counts. (The transcript's auto-captions render the name as "I alone"; the identification of the general as Mossad is Kiriakou's own.)

Kiriakou also used Morgan's platform (and Fox News) to say he believes Epstein material was probably destroyed, noting that despite the Federal Records Act, the CIA destroys documents all the time. A separate appearance covered the JFK files with Colonel Douglas Macgregor.

Interrupting on command

Asked how one makes a point while being constantly cut off, Kiriakou admitted the show's format runs against his nature: his mother raised him not to interrupt. On Piers Morgan that has to go out the window, the producer explicitly told him not to be afraid to interrupt, and that Morgan would break it up if it got to be too much. "I have to force myself to do it on that show."

The panel that agreed

Kiriakou has recounted an appearance in which Morgan pressed him on his premises and found no disagreement anywhere on the panel. Asked whether he believed Hamas is a terrorist organisation, he answered "of course"; asked whether October 7 was a terrorist attack, "of course it was." Asked then what point he was actually holding to, he said: "The point I'm holding to is that Israel has to respect human rights. It really is as simple as that."

Morgan asked whether anybody disagreed. Everybody on the panel agreed with Kiriakou, and Morgan observed that it was the first time the programme had ever talked about Israel, an observation all four panellists accepted. Kiriakou's comment: "What's so hard about that?"

He adds a detail about his own booking: it occurred to him only twenty minutes into the show that Morgan had put him on as one of the right-wing guests.

The IDF spokesman

On a separate appearance Kiriakou responded to an IDF spokesman who said he did not respect Kiriakou's line of inquiry. Kiriakou, trying, he says, to make it a funny line, told him: "Sir, you're the spokesman for a terrorist organization... the biggest terrorist organization in a region known for terrorist organizations."

The framing behind it is one he attributes to Noam Chomsky: that fundamentally the difference between terrorism and counterterrorism is that "it's terrorism when they do it and it's counterterrorism when we do it."

The panel on Israeli espionage

Kiriakou has described a panel Morgan hosted in which he and Scott Horton took one side and Alan Dershowitz and a former head of Israeli intelligence, rendered in the auto-captions as "General Danny Ayalam", took the other.

Kiriakou stated on air that the Israelis actively spy on the United States. Morgan put it to the general, who denied it. Asked about Jonathan Pollard, the general said that "when Pollard got caught, that's when the prime minister ordered us to stop spying on the United States", which Kiriakou dates to 1985.

Kiriakou's answer was a document: "that's funny, because in 1990 I got a briefing from the director of security at the CIA saying that Israel was one of the most active countries engaged in espionage against the United States in the whole world." Morgan turned back to the general, "and he just goes: no comment."

Coming around

Asked for his opinion of Morgan in 2026, John Kiriakou said he had changed it: "I have to say that I've kind of come around on Piers Morgan. I loathed Piers Morgan. I really did." What changed it was being pursued by Morgan's producers, going on, and being treated well.

The appearance he singles out, a panel with Alan Dershowitz, Scott Horton and an Israeli general, ended with Morgan telling him he had finally come around on Gaza and agreed with him, which Kiriakou found heartening from a man who had been "Joe Zionist from the very beginning." The episode is treated at the Piers Morgan panel.

See also

- Alan Dershowitz
- Jonathan Pollard
- Jeffrey Epstein
- MOSSAD
