Mecca Agreement
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The Mecca Agreement is a trilateral security pact between Pakistan, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, celebrated in Islamabad, Turkey and Saudi Arabia in August 2026 and signed in Mecca itself. The Pakistani president was joined by President Erdoğan and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who prayed for the pact's success; the other leaders performed the Umrah. Kiriakou's framing is that it happened in plain sight and was missed: "While Washington has been focused on this Iran war, three of the most powerful countries in the Muslim world have just quietly created a completely new security alliance."

The joint statement released simultaneously by the three governments describes an agreement "intended to strengthen collective deterrence against any act of aggression" and stipulates that an armed attack against any of the three is an attack on all, "essentially the principle at the heart of NATO's article 5." The Turkish vice president said it was not aimed at any specific country, which Kiriakou accepts as literally true while treating it as beside the point.

What it makes collective

The significance, in his account, is arithmetic. Each party brings an enemy, and the pact converts three bilateral quarrels into one multilateral one: "it's Pakistan versus India. It's Turkey versus Israel. And it's Saudi Arabia versus Iran and the Houthis in Yemen." Pakistan is a nuclear power with "a bitter mortal enemy in India"; Saudi Arabia has sought nuclear weapons since the 1980s and, on Dewey Clarridge's account, may already have bought one; Turkey fields one of the most powerful armies in NATO, "behind only the United States and Germany."

The Article 5 paradox

The case Kiriakou works through is Turkey's, because the Israeli defence minister had said two weeks earlier that Israel's next war would be against Turkey. If that war came, Turkey as a NATO member could invoke Article 5, and "theoretically the United States would have to declare war on Israel. Well, that's never going to happen in a million years. It'll be the end of NATO." What has changed is that Turkey no longer needs the answer: "now nuclear armed Pakistan and Saudi Arabia will come to Turkey's assistance. It really does change the face of the region. And most importantly, it leaves the United States completely out of it."

Israel, he says, is "genuinely worried", and did not expect it; nor, he is confident, did Washington. The Israeli official whose remarks he played spoke of a "frontal assessment" with Turkey, which Kiriakou reads as readiness to fight a country with twelve times Israel's population, a readiness that assumed American protection, and "the Americans can't protect them from the Pakistanis or even from the Saudis."

The Houthis were not deterred: surface-to-surface missiles were fired at Saudi Arabia after the agreement was signed. Kiriakou expects that to change "when the Turks send troops and the Pakistanis send troops."

Why Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and why Turkey is the surprise

On the first two he speaks from his own posting: "from the time of my own service in Pakistan, the Pakistanis don't love anybody as much as they love the Saudis." The evidence he offers is a city, Faisalabad, named for King Faisal "because he was so kind and so generous to Pakistan", alongside the hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis working at every level of the Saudi economy and a military and intelligence-sharing relationship already "rock solid." The pact is therefore "a natural move" for those two. Turkey is the anomaly: "I'm going to go on a limb and say that a year ago, nobody probably would have even thought about inviting the Turks until Israel threatened them." Ankara's calculation, as he reads it, is that neither the United States nor the rest of NATO would actually come to its aid against Israel, "and so it sought out new relationships."

The briefing he would give

Asked what he would want to know if he were preparing a CIA briefing on the pact, Kiriakou directs the questions at Marco Rubio, who holds the offices of Secretary of State and National Security Adviser simultaneously. They are about the alliance the United States already has rather than the one it was left out of: this administration has never really supported NATO and calls it outdated and unnecessary, "Is it? Is this the beginning of the end for NATO? Do the Turks also believe that it's the end for NATO?", and if so, what that means for the European Union-wide defence pact whose defence ministers had met three weeks earlier, "because they just don't trust the United States to be there if they need the help."

His own answer to how a foreign intelligence service should feel is one word, "Incredibly optimistic", and the reasoning is a verdict on American power: "the United States seems to be the country that is the slowest to recognize that we have already transitioned into a multipolar world... We can't win wars. We were in Iraq for 20 years, we lost. We were in Afghanistan for 20 years, we lost. We attack Iran, we're losing."

An earlier answer on Article 5

Kiriakou had worked the Turkey,Israel question once before, in March 2026, and reached it from the other direction. Two senior Turkish foreign ministry officials told him over dinner that no hostilities were coming, that if Israel attacked "Turkey would destroy them", and, the part he flagged as not having occurred to him, that Turkey would not ask NATO to invoke Article 5.

The August reasoning above runs the opposite way, treating an invocation as the thing that would expose the alliance. Both accounts are recorded as given; Kiriakou does not reconcile them, and the intervening five months brought the Israeli defence minister's declaration that Israel's next war would be against Turkey, which he identifies as what put Turkey into the pact in the first place.

See also

- Somaliland Israel Recognition
- Abraham Accords
- Dewey Clarridge
- Houthis
- 2026 Iran war
