Gerald Bull
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Gerald Bull was a British inventor who designed the "big gun", "just a gigantic barrel, like a gun that was so big that they had to lean it against the side of a mountain." Per John Kiriakou, Bull "went to the Israelis and he said, 'Hey, I invented this big gun. It's so big you have to lean it against a mountain.' And the Israelis said, 'Get out of here, we're not interested in your stupid gun.' And the Iraqis said, 'We'll take it.'"

The Iraqi engineering problem

Per Kiriakou: every time the Iraqis tried to fire the big gun "it would crack and they had to keep repairing it. Finally, they came up with this idea of using something that they called the condom, but instead of going over the gun, it went inside the barrel so that the barrel was smoother."

Mossad

"As soon as they figured out that condom would work, the Israelis bombed the gun and they murdered Gerald Bull in Brussels." The reason for killing Bull rather than the buyer: "They don't want him making any more guns for the Iraqis. ... Nobody else would buy this stupid gun. Only the Iraqis were willing to buy it."

The supergun and the condom (JK Podcast)

John Kiriakou says Gerald Bull and his "big gun" were among the very first things he learned about in his first week at the CIA. The gun was so enormous it had to be leaned against the side of a mountain to fire, sending a shell as far as a missile; nobody wanted it until Iraq bought it. When test-firing kept cracking the barrel, Bull devised a "condom" liner to smooth it, but the Israelis assassinated him before he could test it. Kiriakou recalls asking his boss if it was a joke; "No, this is deadly serious," he was told. He has given the same account again in nearly identical terms, adding the detail that the gun's problem was that it had no market, "What are we going to do with this giant gun? It's as big as a house", until Iraq took it, and reporting the boss's answer verbatim: "No, no, this is deadly serious. It's a giant gun. They have to lean it up on the side of the mountain to fire it."

The context in which he raises it there is why Israel treated Iraq rather than Iran as the immediate threat in the 1980s: Iran had no nuclear programme at the time, while Iraq had nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programmes, and Bull's gun.

See also

- MOSSAD
- Saddam Hussein
