Benjamin Netanyahu
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Benjamin Netanyahu is, in John Kiriakou's description, "brilliant" and "dangerous," a player who runs rings around every other Israeli figure. Kiriakou calls him arguably the most unpopular yet longest-serving figure in Israeli history. Asked for a one-line assessment, Kiriakou called him "probably the foremost war criminal on the planet."

The 1989 profile

During his 1989 CIA application interviews, John Kiriakou was given a folder of clippings on Benjamin Netanyahu, then Israel's UN ambassador, and asked to write a one-page psychological analysis; he concluded Netanyahu would probably become prime minister one day, and he did.

Domestic politics and legal jeopardy

The 27 per cent ceiling

Against his own account of Israeli influence over American policy, Kiriakou offers one structural limit, "there's one bit of hope, one ray of hope." Netanyahu is the longest-serving prime minister in Israeli history and yet "he has never gotten more than 27% of the vote", because the number of viable parties means power is assembled rather than won.

He puts the same arithmetic to a second use, against the practice of labelling Netanyahu's critics antisemitic. Because of Israel's party system, he says, "Benjamin Netanyahu has never won more than 27% of the vote in Israel", from which he draws the reductio: if disagreeing with Netanyahu as a person makes a critic antisemitic, then "are we supposed to assume that 73% of Israelis are anti-Semitic?" He adds that other leaders elected on comparable minorities have gone on to do great damage.

He pairs the ceiling with the demographic change that has raised the floor under the parties to Netanyahu's right, and with a possibility rather than a prediction: that in elections he expects in October, "there may be a movement among the populace to say enough is enough."

The coalition and its ministers

Netanyahu wins government with roughly a quarter of the vote, and Kiriakou characterises the resulting cabinet, with Bezalel Smotrich at finance and over the West Bank and Itamar Ben-Gvir at national security, as "the most extreme right-wing government in the history of Israel."

The corruption charges and the Milchan visa

As of a mid-2024 interview, Netanyahu was, Kiriakou said, the most unpopular major political figure in Israel, with a 22% approval rating even before October 7, and faced fraud, criminal, and corruption charges predating the attack.

One of those charges concerns Arnon Milchan. Kiriakou says Netanyahu lobbied Secretary of State John Kerry three times to restore the revoked U.S. visa of the Israeli spy, and that FBI documents place Netanyahu personally in the smuggling of U.S. nuclear secrets.

The judicial takeover and the summer before October 7

Kiriakou treats the months immediately preceding 7 October as politically decisive rather than incidental. Netanyahu seized control of the judiciary five weeks before the attack, timing Kiriakou calls "quite interesting", and the response was demonstrations in Tel Aviv and Haifa "that were unprecedented in scale." Israel, in his account, came close to civil war that summer, and Netanyahu came "this close to being overthrown and having to call new elections."

October 7 and the Gaza campaign

A political gift

Kiriakou describes the October 7 attack as a "God-sent gift" for Netanyahu, one that keeps him in power and out of prison. He has said he believes the Israeli government under Netanyahu was hoping for an attack like October 7, because it would provide the perceived legal authority to destroy the whole of Gaza, not merely Hamas. Kiriakou has gone on to characterize the resulting Israeli campaign as genocide, a term, he says, he does not use lightly, while affirming that Israel has a right to exist.

The Rome ceasefire talks

During a Netanyahu visit to Washington, Rome ceasefire talks between Israel, Hamas, the United States, Egypt, and Qatar broke up after the Egyptian delegation complained the Israeli delegation had no authority to agree to anything. Kiriakou says National Security Council spokesman John Kirby stated that Netanyahu "didn't even pretend to support a ceasefire" during that visit.

Land, settlements, and the two-state solution

Kiriakou traces a longer pattern of dispossession to Netanyahu's tenure: across his seven terms as prime minister, he says, Israel has seized more Palestinian land, destroyed more farms, burned more olive trees, and confiscated more water sources every year. Kiriakou says pro-settlement groups have gone as far as holding "real estate seminars" at synagogues in New York, New Jersey, and California, advertising the sale of Palestinian land in Gaza that the Israeli government plans to redevelop as settlements, citing Jared Kushner's comments about Gaza "beachfront property" as evidence the redevelopment was the plan rather than an accident.

On the diplomatic track, Kiriakou says Netanyahu "very proudly said that he killed the two-state solution," leaving no chance of a real peace while Israel bombs Palestinian negotiating teams abroad. He adds that Trump, Biden, Obama and Bush all simply accept that Netanyahu "is going to run American foreign policy."

The International Criminal Court

On the International Criminal Court, Kiriakou notes the charges Netanyahu faces are war crimes and crimes against humanity, and describes his Sean Hannity interview about the risk of arrest abroad as "crocodile tears".

The campaign to bomb Iran

Seven visits, and the standing request

Kiriakou says that from the Reagan era, every Israeli prime minister asked American presidents to bomb Iran. Netanyahu has repeatedly begged the United States to attack going back to the George W. Bush administration; Kiriakou says the U.S. came very close to attacking Iran in the final weeks of that administration, and that Netanyahu "has dedicated his life to dragging the United States into a war with Iran." Every single time Netanyahu came to Washington going back to the early 1990s, including when he was Israel's ambassador to the UN, before he was ever prime minister, he urged whichever president was in office to bomb Iran, and every president said no until Trump agreed.

Kiriakou has quantified the frequency of the requests. Israeli prime ministers ordinarily come to Washington once or twice a year; Netanyahu came seven times in the year to March 2026. Every visit, regardless of prime minister or president, produced the same request to bomb Iran, going back to the 1980s, and every president refused.

He has since said the U.S. ultimately went to war with Iran because of Israel: Iran, in his assessment, posed no threat to the United States, and Israel had been pushing for the U.S. to bomb it since the 1980s, with every Israeli prime minister making the same request regardless of who was U.S. president.

The six-month claim

Kiriakou describes the accompanying claim as a standing joke inside the CIA: Netanyahu is always invited to address Congress, which is itself unusual, and every time he says the Iranians are six months from a nuclear weapon. "Well, you've been saying that since 1986, and they're still six months away from a nuclear weapon. Well, they're not. They never were."

Against the claim he sets the intelligence record: two National Intelligence Estimates, representing all 18 members of the U.S. intelligence community, found Iran did not have a nuclear weapons program, and Ayatollah Khamenei had issued a 2003 fatwa declaring nuclear weapons a sin.

The house-of-cards premise

Kiriakou identifies the operating assumption behind the 2026 Iran war, that the Iranian government "would collapse like a house of cards" as soon as the first missile flew, as originating with Netanyahu rather than with American analysis: "anybody with any brains at all knew that was ridiculous. And that was a Netanyahu talking point going back to the 1990s." He says the president was convinced of it easily, by all reports. Netanyahu having convinced Trump that the Iranian government was a "house of cards", Kiriakou notes that, in a break from past practice, the U.S. intelligence community did not even attempt to manufacture public consent for the resulting war.

The nuclear threats

Kiriakou recounts that Barack Obama recently stated Netanyahu asked him to bomb Iran and threatened that if the U.S. refused, Israel would use nuclear weapons, a bluff Obama called by telling him to go ahead, after which Netanyahu backed down. His account of how the standoff with Washington finally broke is Netanyahu's threat to Trump: that Israel would use nuclear weapons against Iran if the United States did not act.

What Kiriakou believes Israel wants

Kiriakou says he believes a peaceful transition of power in Iran serves U.S. interests, while chaos and death serve Israel's interests, and that he believes Netanyahu is hoping for an Iranian civil war, modeled, in his view, on what Israel achieved in Libya: chaos, civil war, and as many Iranian deaths as possible. He describes this chaos-focused strategy as a short-term view: Israel believes that keeping the region in a state of chaos prevents its neighbors from developing nuclear weapons, temporarily protecting Israel, rather than pursuing lasting security. During the strikes on Iran, Kiriakou reported that Netanyahu characteristically left the country, as he says Netanyahu always does whenever Israel plans a bombing campaign, with most reports placing him in Germany, and one report suggesting Cyprus.

Two related observations sit alongside the Iran material in the same appearances. Kiriakou has acknowledged he was wrong to have told Joe Rogan in October 2025 that he thought Trump would make peace with Iran in pursuit of a Nobel Peace Prize; he says Trump has since stated publicly that he no longer cares about peace since he did not receive the prize. And he has noted that CIA Director John Ratcliffe traveled to Cuba about a week before one such interview, which Kiriakou interprets not as back-channel diplomacy but as a warning of coming regime-change action, comparing it to sending the CIA director to warn Muammar Gaddafi before Libya's overthrow.

The same speech, three wars

Iraq, Libya, Iran

Kiriakou treats Netanyahu's congressional testimony as a single repeated argument, and has narrated it in the same shape on more than one occasion. Before Congress in 2002, the claim was that Saddam Hussein was an existential threat to Israel and the United States and that overthrowing him would bring peace to the Middle East, "And then there wasn't." In 2008 or 2009 the same case was made about Muammar Gaddafi and the Libyan government: "we did that, and it just made everything worse." A year before the broadcast the argument was made again, about the Iranian government. "No, we won't."

Who bears the cost

What he draws from the pattern is a claim about who pays for it: "We do all of Israel's dirty work for it. We kill thousands, tens of thousands of people. And what do we get out of it? Nothing."

The lesson he says Iran will draw

He extends it into a conclusion he flags as controversial before making it, that the sequence teaches Iran the opposite of the intended lesson. The reason North Korea is not under discussion, he says, is that it has a weapon, "and so nobody dares attack North Korea"; from which he concludes that for an Iranian leader "the only thing you can do to protect yourself" is to build one, and that "frankly, that's the next step. You can't bomb them forever."

Netanyahu and Trump

"Netanyahu believed he could control Trump"

Asked in June 2026 whether the visible rift between the two men was genuine or staged, Kiriakou said it was genuine and gave its structure: "They don't like each other. But I think that Trump liked Netanyahu more than Netanyahu liked Trump. Trump believed he could work with Netanyahu. Netanyahu believed he could control Trump", and duped him into the Iran war, leaving the United States bogged down and the Republican party split between neoconservatives and the MAGA movement, "which could spell the end for the MAGA movement."

What he says angers Trump most, on the reporting of Republicans in Washington, is being made to look weak: "when Trump says ceasefire, then damn it, he means ceasefire", and Netanyahu "just says screw you and your ceasefire" before bombing Lebanon, Iran, Yemen or Doha. Kiriakou adds a specific humiliation: Trump had publicly demanded that the Israeli president drop the seven felony corruption charges pending against Netanyahu, "and then what's he get in response? He gets the back of the hand."

He treats the ceasefires themselves as fictions: "first we should put out of our minds that there is any such thing as a ceasefire. Those are just words. They're words that don't mean anything", because Israel exempts Hezbollah from them, and attacking Hezbollah means attacking the Lebanese people, at which point Iran retaliates and the ceasefire is gone.

Qatar, and the two hours' notice

Kiriakou dates Netanyahu's decisive overreach to the strike on Qatar: "Benjamin Netanyahu went too far when he bombed Qatar. Too far." The reason is the status of the target, a major non-NATO ally hosting an American air base Kiriakou calls the largest in the world.

The sequel embarrassed Washington. Donald Trump said publicly that the Israelis had not given him enough time to warn the Qataris, "probably not true," Kiriakou says, and Netanyahu then stated that he had given Trump two hours' notice before the attack. On Kiriakou's account that is the moment Trump "realized that this could ruin everything," and came to the conclusion that "Israel acts in the national interests of Israel and the US must act in the national interests of the United States."

The closed meeting and the wall of granite

After Lindsey Graham's funeral, Netanyahu went to the White House for a closed-press meeting with Donald Trump, then gave an exclusive interview to Sean Hannity. Kiriakou treats the press exclusion as the tell: "We're We're talking about two major world leaders who love love love to get in front of cameras. So, why were two of the most camera-happy leaders in the world afraid to answer questions? I think it's because the reality is the relationship between Donald Trump Benjamin Netanyahu has never been any more tense."

Netanyahu's public account was the opposite. The meeting was "one one of the best meetings that we've had", and critics looking for cracks in the alliance would find instead "a wall of granite, cuz the president is so clear." Trump's own next-morning television appearance undercut it on both Pickaxe Mountain and the F-35 sale to Turkey.

The denial, and the rebuke

Kiriakou is equally unimpressed by the denial issued afterwards by Netanyahu's communications director, that Israel is not pushing the United States in any direction on Iran and the prime minister "is not telling the US president what to do". His verdict is unqualified: "You have to be utterly brain dead to believe a single word of that... Does that sound like something you would say if you were not pushing your friend in a certain direction? Would you deny it multiple times in a few sentences?" His test is the form of the statement rather than its content: "Would you deny it multiple times in a few sentences?"

Trump's own verdict afterwards, "Excellent meeting... Bibi understands now", Kiriakou reads as confirmation of a rebuke: "That tells me that the president slapped him down."

Working American public opinion

The vocabulary

Kiriakou reads Netanyahu as a media operator working on American opinion rather than Israeli opinion, "he knows that American public opinion, at least on Israel and on Muslim countries, is easily malleable", and that the operative vocabulary is short: "all you have to do is say Islam, terrorism, nuclear, and everybody just runs around like their hair is on fire." The purpose of saying it publicly rather than privately is "to influence American public opinion to pressure the president to do what you want him to do", and his reading of the July 2026 meeting is that Donald Trump "is tired of Netanyahu constantly trying to manipulate him."

Netanyahu has also been the subject of photo opportunities with various American politicians, including Cory Booker.

The aid phase-out as messaging

Reacting to Netanyahu's eulogy for Lindsey Graham, in which Netanyahu recounted telling Graham that Israel could finance its own defence and phase American military support down to zero, and Graham "went ballistic", Kiriakou reads the remark as a deliberate and subtle political move most Americans would miss.

His reasoning: Netanyahu knows most Americans dislike foreign aid, and Israel is the largest recipient of it. Announcing that Israel no longer wants the money is, in Kiriakou's reading, an attempt to turn American public opinion back toward Israel rather than a genuine concession. Kiriakou adds that he personally favours foreign aid as cheap soft power, but that a first-world economy co-located with American military and intelligence officials, and running spies across the country to steal American secrets, does not need it.

The American numbers

The polling he cites runs against the effort. Democrats oppose Netanyahu over Gaza by a factor of two to one and oppose the war with Iran by the same margin; independents are "just as equally opposed"; and "a sizable minority of Republicans" has joined them. His conclusion is about efficacy, not morality: "what the Israeli government is doing, it's backfiring."

The Security Council vote and the question of a Palestinian state

Kiriakou had predicted on air the day before that China and Russia would abstain rather than veto, on the reasoning that neither government much cares about the Middle East and that if voting the American way will make the Americans stop talking, they will extract what they can and abstain. The resolution passed 13,0 on exactly that pattern. He notes that the subsequent reporting discussed Russia's abstention and not China's.

Almost all of the council members who spoke, France, Guyana, Pakistan, Slovenia, Somalia, complained that there was no language in the text about an independent Palestinian state, which is, in Kiriakou's phrase, where everyone will get wrapped around the axle again. Netanyahu's own statement was that opposition to a Palestinian state in any territory had not changed.

Kiriakou's position against that is unambiguous: the Israelis will have to be forced, there has to be an independent Palestine, there is no other alternative, and one was called for in the Security Council resolution that created the state of Israel in the first place. He adds that reasonable Israelis know it is essential to their own security.

Assessments

The longer view

On the longer horizon Kiriakou credits Netanyahu with more strategic patience than any American politician: "Netanyahu has a far longer view than any American politician does regardless of what political party he or she happens to be from. And that longer view is greater Israel."

Roger Waters on Netanyahu and Patagonia

Interviewed by John Kiriakou in 2026, Roger Waters said he believed, on circumstantial evidence, that senior Israeli figures were already looking at Patagonia as a refuge for the point at which they expect prices to be put on their heads, and that the prospect of Netanyahu living out his life in Argentina "actually makes me happy so long as they're not in the Holy Land." He named Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich in the same breath, and said retribution sat "at the bottom of my list", above it, the care owed to any single surviving child in Gaza.

Waters also speculated about Netanyahu's formation, saying that whatever produced him must lie in a childhood "growing up in Brooklyn" about which little is heard, and that he would like to hear a specialist in childhood trauma account for it.

"Just as much authority"

Asked during the 2026 Iran war whose interests the American president was representing, John Kiriakou gave the comparison in institutional terms: "Honestly, on foreign policy, Benjamin Netanyahu has just as much authority as whoever happens to be president of the United States. We've conceded foreign policy to the Israelis and to Israeli interests."

The remark was prompted by reports that Netanyahu had telephoned the White House to check whether it was true that Trump had sought a ceasefire with Iran behind the scenes. Kiriakou also tracked his disappearance from public view during the war, recorded at Netanyahu in hiding.

The 15-point plan, refused

In August 2026 the United States proposed a fifteen-point peace plan for Gaza whose central condition paired the withdrawal of Israeli forces with the disarmament of Hamas. Netanyahu answered in Hebrew; Kiriakou summarised the translation for his audience and treated the answer as leaving nothing open: "There will not be a Palestine, period, ever in any form on any land. He couldn't have been any more clear. He doesn't care what Donald Trump says. He doesn't care what Marco Rubio says."

On the second half of the answer, that Israel will not stop in Gaza until Hamas is disarmed, Kiriakou supplies the consequence he takes from Israeli practice: "the Israeli government considers every man, woman, and child of any age to be a combatant. And so, the war will continue. The killing of civilians will continue. The Israeli occupation will continue." The number of points in the plan is therefore irrelevant: "It can be a onepoint plan or a 5,000point plan. He doesn't care."

What he calls the interesting part is the American response. A senior official told Axios the White House "is not bothered" by the rejection and sees it as part of the Israeli election season, adding: "We understand BB's political needs. We have no problem with it as long as he continues to do what we ask, especially regarding restraining attacks in Gaza." Kiriakou's response is first a general caution, "Really impossible to believe anyone in their public statements. Everybody's lying in every country", and then the specific objection, that an election "is not a reason to be allowed to commit war crimes."

See also

- Jonathan Pollard
- October 7 attack
- Itamar Ben-Gvir
- AIPAC
- Hamas
- Iran 12-Day War
