The killing of Iranian police
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The theory behind the campaign is the one Kiriakou says Benjamin Netanyahu and other Iran hawks have argued for years: apply enough pressure, weaken the security apparatus, and the Iranian people will rise and overthrow the government. Trump's first speech announcing the war addressed the Iranian people directly, "Rise up. Now is your time."

Kiriakou sets that against what had happened weeks earlier. Iranian police had suppressed protests in January, killing by many estimates 30,000 civilians, "The Israelis say it was 80,000", and the United States had condemned it. He states the sequence deliberately and then repeats it: "We jumped up and down when the Iranians killed protesters... and we decided to start killing Iranian law enforcement officers, police, and domestic security."

Method and attribution

The method is targeted rather than aerial: "We're not talking about bombing police stations. That's not happening. We're talking about assassins and saboteurs on the ground." His attribution rests on capability and on advertising, the operatives are "likely Israelis, because the US doesn't have a presence inside Iran, and the Israelis brag about the extent of their presence, and they are assassinating individual policemen." He cites the Iranian president confirming attacks on individual officers in an address to the National Security Council, and reports the president's own comparison: that the Americans and Israelis did the same in Afghanistan and in Iraq, as "part of the arsenal of operations" both states carry out.

The result

Kiriakou's assessment is that the campaign inverted its own purpose: "instead of leading to the immediate collapse of this country, we have unified Iranians on the ground, whether they were pro-regime or anti-regime." He files it under the conclusion he says he drew from the Iraq war while still at the CIA: "we are never seen as liberators. We're seen as attackers and occupiers." His verdict on the war follows directly: "I think the time is beyond ready to end this thing."

See also

- 2026 Iran war
- Iran's conditions for reopening the Strait of Hormuz
- Benjamin Netanyahu
