Iran 12-Day War
===============

The Iran 12-Day War was a 2025 Israeli air campaign against Iran with closing U.S. participation. It is invoked by John Kiriakou as the operationally and morally categorical departure of Israeli targeting doctrine from U.S. and CIA doctrine, in particular with regard to acceptable-civilian-casualty calculus. Kiriakou says Iran posed no actual threat to the United States: it had no nuclear weapon and no nuclear weapons program, a fact he says was confirmed twice, by both the CIA and the International Atomic Energy Agency, and Iran maintained a standing fatwa against ever developing one, and even had it possessed a weapon, it had no delivery system to use it.

Scientist-killing campaign

The Israeli effort killed at least fourteen Iranian nuclear scientists by destroying the apartment buildings in which they resided. For each scientist, the campaign was preceded by a coordinated telephone call from an Iranian-Jewish MOSSAD or Shin Bet officer, operating in Farsi, to the scientist's personal cell phone, offering defection in exchange for survival; a parallel call was placed to the scientist's wife. "Listen, you're going to die tomorrow, right? We're going to kill you tomorrow. You have no hope. You're going to die. Just accept it. Or you can defect to us right now." When the scientists declined, the apartment buildings were destroyed, killing the scientists' families in addition to the scientists themselves.

The operation has continued past the immediate killing: per Kiriakou, Israeli intelligence is now mapping the next generation of Iranian nuclear scientists.

Contrast with CIA doctrine

Kiriakou contrasts the campaign with CIA targeted-killing practice, which proceeds, at least in standing orders, under a "fewest civilian casualties as humanly possible" rule, normally via either drone strike on the target alone or in-person close-in actions. "For there to be a half-dozen people killed in a drone attack, that's unusual." The Israeli policy, by contrast: "They will take out the entire city block if there's one target in one of those apartment buildings that they want to get."

U.S. closing role

The campaign concluded with U.S. participation: a single strike using "the biggest bomb that humankind has ever seen", the basis on which President Donald Trump sought to broker a return to negotiations on the Iranian nuclear program. Kiriakou's assessment of the diplomatic logic is unfavorable: "What's the incentive for them to do what you want a second time? Why would they trust you?" In the same conversation, Kiriakou cites Iran scholar Trita Parsi's prediction of a renewed war in support of his argument that the U.S. cannot serve as honest broker after the 12-Day War's conclusion.

An undersized force against a country 3.8 times Iraq's size

Kiriakou says the US had only about 50,000 troops in the Gulf region and two carrier attack groups for the war, against the 170,000 troops used at the height of the Iraq War, even though Iran is 3.8 times the size of Iraq and has more forbidding terrain. He says Netanyahu had convinced Trump that Iran's government would collapse "like a house of cards" once the first rocket was fired, a claim no CIA, State Department or Defense Department analyst believed. He attributes Israel's tactical targeting of Iranian generals and scientists to traffic cameras used to track their movements for real-time strikes, distinct, he stresses, from the long-term human intelligence inside the Ayatollah's office that Israel lacks. As a range test, he says, Israel fired two stripped-down, payload-less rockets that reached Diego Garcia, both were intercepted and shot down.

The Strait of Hormuz toll and the petrodollar

Kiriakou says Iran announced plans to charge ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz a toll that could raise as much as $100 billion a year. He notes Iran allowed an Indian-flagged ship carrying UAE oil bound for China to pass through the Strait after China paid for the oil in yuan rather than dollars, which he calls a nightmare scenario for an American economy tied to the petrodollar. Trump later posted on Truth Social telling allies like the United Kingdom, which had refused to join the operation, to stop relying on the US for jet fuel from the Strait and instead "build up some delayed courage" to seize it themselves, a post Kiriakou reads as both reckless and, by his own account, describing an act that would itself be a war crime against sovereign Iranian territory.

Rubio's preemption rationale and the absence of an exit strategy

Kiriakou says Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated on camera that the US struck Iran preemptively because Israel had told Washington it was going to attack Iran and expected Iranian retaliation against American interests, so the US struck first. He says the only "imminent, impending thing" prompting US involvement was Netanyahu telling Trump Israel would attack regardless, and cites former Secretary of State Antony Blinken's account that Netanyahu had tried the identical approach with Obama and Biden, both of whom declined to join, after which Israel did not attack alone. On that basis Kiriakou argues Netanyahu "railroaded" Trump into a war Biden and Obama had both rejected, suggesting Israel likely would not have struck Iran alone without US backing, and that Trump was "duped" into a war Kiriakou believes cannot be won. Drawing on his own CIA experience as executive assistant to the agency's deputy director during the Iraq War, he says there is never an exit strategy once a war starts: overthrowing a government is easy, but what follows is the part the US has again failed to plan for.

Kiriakou separately argues the strikes were illegal under international law, which he says permits attacking another country on only three grounds, having been attacked, being asked to intervene to save the country, or authorization by the UN Security Council, and that none of the three applied, making the war a war crime by his account. He contrasts the internal split over the 2003 Iraq War, where clear pro-war factions (the Office of the Vice President, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Council) faced off against anti-war factions (the CIA, State Department, Joint Chiefs), with the 2025,26 Iran war, which he says lacked the backing of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the CIA, the Office of the Vice President, and the Joint Chiefs alike. He has said he expected to clash with Sean Hannity over the war on Hannity's show.

On Trump's stated motive, Kiriakou says the president wanted a broad settling deal with Iran along the lines of the Abraham Accords and believed attacking Iran would frighten it back to the negotiating table, even though Iran was already engaged in at least three rounds of face-to-face negotiations, still at a technical stage, before the bombing began. He confirms Israel struck first, with the United States following up using 30,000-lb bunker-buster bombs. Kiriakou also relays, without endorsing, Trump's own account that Netanyahu asked him to bomb Iran and warned that Israel would use nuclear weapons if Trump refused, framing Trump's non-nuclear strikes as having spared Iranian lives. Some months later he gave the same account on his own authority, attributing it to a source rather than to Trump, and used it to reverse his own initial verdict on the strike. He sets it against the whole prior record: from his entry on duty under George H. W. Bush, every Israeli government asked every American president to bomb Iran and every president refused, because the standing assessment was that a strike "would be the start of World War II" by obliging China or Russia to intervene. What broke the pattern, on this telling, was a threat never previously made, "if you don't bomb Iran to take out these deep bunkers, we're going to use nuclear weapons", leading Trump to conclude that bombing Iran "might actually save us from the start of World War II if it keeps the Israelis from using nuclear weapons." Kiriakou states plainly that this changed his own view: "Before it was done, I would have thought it was insanity. After it's been done, I think I've come to the conclusion that, all right, that wasn't so bad after all," because he believes the Israelis "really intended" to use a weapon. He treats the absence of Chinese or Russian intervention as tentative evidence against the long-standing premise, while cautioning that the conclusion may be premature. On the night Israel opened the campaign, it killed the top four Iranian military commanders, which Kiriakou calls the same decapitation strategy Israel had already used against Hamas and Hezbollah; Israel's UN ambassador stated that day that Israel's policy was regime change in Iran, prompting Kiriakou to ask what that implied about the use of Israel's own nuclear arsenal.

As of October 2025, Kiriakou said the Iran experts he had consulted universally believed Israel would attack Iran again before December 1, 2025.

Killing of Ayatollah Khamenei and regional retaliation

In a later escalation, Kiriakou and Ted Rall discussed reports that Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who had led Iran for nearly 37 years, was killed by an Israeli airstrike guided by the United States, with the CIA having warned Trump beforehand that Khamenei's successor could prove at least as hardline, possibly emerging from the Revolutionary Guards. True to that warning, a new supreme leader was reported chosen within a day or two of Khamenei's death, which Kiriakou takes as proof of the regime's continuity, comparing the killing to assassinating the Pope: an important religious figure, but not someone whose removal changes the underlying system. Israeli strikes in the same period also killed the Ayatollah's daughter, son-in-law, and grandson, along with the entire senior and second- and third-string tier of Iranian military leadership. Kiriakou says Israel separately killed more than 100 schoolgirls in a strike on a school in southern Iran, calling it deliberate targeting of civilians that drew little sustained media attention. He says he agrees the Israeli intent all along was to torpedo a nuclear deal with Iran in favor of regime change, citing New York Times reporting that US negotiators kept shifting their demands to terms the Iranians could not meet.

Iranian retaliation in this phase was limited: rockets fired at the Jebel Ali free port in Dubai, an intercepted rocket aimed at Saudi oil fields, a missile landing in Abu Dhabi, damage to hotels in Dubai, and strikes that rendered both Manama Airport in Bahrain and Kuwait International Airport unusable and in need of repair. Iranian drones also struck Dubai's Burj Al Arab hotel, setting it on fire with significant damage, and hit the Burj Khalifa with two drones. Kiriakou says he would believe reports that Bahraini firefighters refused to fight the airport fire, noting Bahrain has a Shia Muslim-majority population ruled by a Sunni royal family, a longstanding source of tension. He explains the pattern of strikes on Kuwait and the UAE/Dubai airports by pointing to the US military footprint hosted across the Gulf: two US bases in Kuwait, the US Fifth Fleet headquartered in Bahrain, the world's largest US Air Force base in Qatar, two US Army bases in the UAE, and multiple US Army and Air Force bases in Saudi Arabia. He says striking Dubai outright would not benefit Iran, since Dubai is full of Iranian businessmen and serves as Iran's outlet for evading sanctions through business there. His contacts in the UAE told him their government sent its ships out of port not to fight but to protect them, and he did not expect Gulf Arab states to retaliate against Iran, expecting them instead to let the US and Israel handle it with British air support.

Kiriakou called Trump's prediction that the war would last only a couple of days unrealistic, saying he would not be surprised if active US-Israeli hostilities continued for weeks or up to a month. He said putting US boots on the ground against a country of 92 million people would be politically catastrophic, "the death knell", for the United States, framing the asymmetry of the war's aims as one where the US and Israel have to win outright while Iran merely has to survive. He contrasted the campaign with the carpet bombing of the 1990,91 Gulf War, calling the Iran campaign a far more precisely targeted conflict. He predicted that, as in the Iraq War, promises of cheap oil from the war would backfire into high oil and consumer prices that would undercut Trump's inflation-fighting efforts, and dismissed Venezuelan oil as too heavy and chemical-laden to serve as a substitute. Drawing a historical parallel, he noted Ronald Reagan sent the US Navy to escort oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz in the 1980s after Iran threatened to close it, and predicted a similar long-term US naval escort presence might again become necessary, itself an invitation to further escalation.

On the roots of the conflict, Kiriakou gave a historical account running from the 1979 overthrow of the Shah, through the 1980,88 Iran,Iraq War in which Iraq was armed and financed by the United States against Iran, to the decades of harsh US sanctions that followed. He said that during his own time in Iran, urban Iranians tended to be liberal and resentful of the government's dress and social restrictions, while rural Iranians were far more conservative and formed the government's base of support.

Drone and missile warfare

During the 12-day war, Kiriakou says Iran sent 600 slow-moving drones toward Israel by routing them over Iraq and Jordan, a tactic he says Iran itself termed "strategic patience." While Israel's Iron Dome intercepted most of them, seven got through, which Kiriakou calls valuable intelligence about the Iron Dome's limits. He says Iran cannot yet strike the US mainland with drones, but tested missiles stripped of their warheads to extend their range toward Diego Garcia, coming close to reaching it, and predicts Iran will eventually be able to strike Western Europe.

The 2026 Iran protests

Kiriakou describes a subsequent wave of Iran protests as initially framed around economic grievances, but says the protesters acquired guns and killed police, with Israeli media later taking credit for arming the Mujahedin-e Khalq and the Kurds and for setting fire to mosques while disabling the fire trucks that would have extinguished them. He says the widely cited casualty figures of 30,000 to 90,000 protester deaths trace to two human-rights organizations, one in London and one in Washington, both funded by the Israeli government, one of which, he notes, shares a zip code with the Pentagon. He says protesters used Starlink satellite terminals, supplied via the US and Musk/DoD channels, to build a parallel communications network outside government control, and that this kind of support, funding, cell phones, or Starlink terminals, with weapons in extreme cases, is regular CIA and MOSSAD practice.

The three-day-early prediction

John Kiriakou said he publicly predicted the U.S. strike on Iran three days before it happened after a Pentagon-side friend confided that the White House had settled on "Monday or Tuesday." He says he corroborated the tip against a piece of tradecraft he learned very early at the CIA: "if you want to determine American military intentions, watch naval movements." An aircraft carrier strike group, he said, signals seriousness; two of them signals war. "And we sent two."

JCPOA-like ending and the sticking point

On how the confrontation would ultimately be resolved, Kiriakou predicted the endpoint would look very much like the JCPOA, "we won it's all over we have this agreement", with the real sticking point being the disposition of the uranium Iran had already enriched to 60 or 80 percent, which the United States had newly insisted be transferred to it rather than to China, the United Arab Emirates or Saudi Arabia.

Geopolitical fallout

Kiriakou argued the conflict had "pushed the Iranians deeper into the embrace of China, Russia and India", three of the four BRICS partners named, and accelerated the day the international community either drops the petrodollar or begins buying oil in yuan, which he said would have a "long-term deleterious effect on the American economy." He said the Russians and Chinese were now providing Iran with targeting information "the same way we give the Ukrainians targeting information", the same practice the Russians used against the United States in Vietnam.

Iran as the reacting party

Against the argument that Iran presented an imminent threat, Kiriakou puts the sequence the other way round: "The Iranians have been reactive to this, not proactive." He grounds it in what he says Iranians were watching, events "in Lebanon, in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Syria", and concludes that "there has to be a response."

His objection to the pre-emption case is that it makes Israeli intention self-justifying: "you can't just say, 'well, you know what, we're an existential threat to the Israelis, so of course the Israelis are going to have to bomb us.' That's just not real life." He delivered the assessment on a panel where he was one of two participants accused on air of spinelessness for opposing the war, and answered by calling the campaign itself "a disastrous miscalculation" that had opened a split inside the Republican Party.

See also

- MOSSAD
- Iran
- Donald Trump
- Hassan Nasrallah
- Iran Strike Factions (2026)
- Iran Nuclear Assessment
