Oman
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Oman is the Gulf state John Kiriakou names as America's steadiest friend in the region, and the channel he argues Washington should be using to reach Iran.

"Friends of ours for generations"

Kiriakou's assessment is unusually warm and explicitly non-contingent: "The Omanis have been friends of ours for generations. It doesn't matter who the president is. It doesn't matter who the Sultan is. The Omanis are friends of ours."

What distinguishes them, in his account, is restraint toward their neighbours, they "never" interfere with them. "They're extraordinarily peaceful people. They're thoughtful. I like the Omanis very much."

The back channel

The strategic value follows from the same quality: Oman is also close to Iran, and "many, many times over the years, the Omanis have acted as the go-between between the United States and Iran."

His recommendation is to use it, "I think we should approach the Omanis again, just like we should approach the Algerians." The Algerian precedent he cites is the release of the American hostages in 1981: "It was the Algerians of all people who got our hostages out." He notes wryly that popular memory has replaced them, "I always thought it was Ben Affleck." (In a later telling he credits the release jointly, to "the Omanis... working with the Algerians"; see below.)

The contrast he draws is with what was done instead: "we should engage rather than just send a carrier battle group off the coast of southern Iran and then just make threats. We should be engaging in diplomacy even if that diplomacy is not public."

His view of what such engagement could achieve is expansive: "I have little doubt that if an American administration reached out to Iran, we could settle our outstanding issues and end up with diplomatic relations and trade relations." The obstacle he identifies in the envoy's conduct is where the reporting goes, a troubleshooter should do the job, "and I don't mean then run back to Jerusalem every couple of days to report back."

Underneath the diplomacy he places a claim about temperament: "Americans and Iranians are so much more similar than Americans would bet." And personally, "I've never met an Iranian that I didn't like. I mean that with complete sincerity." The one group he excepts is the Persian exile community in Los Angeles, whom he calls "a different breed."

"We owe the Omanis a great deal"

In a February 2026 Q&A, ahead of a visit, Kiriakou set out the debt in more detail. "I have a deep and abiding respect for the Omanis, for the Omani government, and for the Omani people. They are truly a peace-loving people."

He credits them with an outcome usually attributed elsewhere: "it was the Omanis who got the American hostages released from Iran in 1981, working with the Algerians." And the role has been continuous, "it's the Omanis who have been the middleman in literally all of our negotiations with the Iranian government over the decades."

The function he describes is interpretive as much as diplomatic: "it's the Omanis who will quietly call Iran and say, 'Listen, you're not understanding what the American position is. This is what the American position is.'" His conclusion: "We owe the Omanis a great deal."

The country itself

Kiriakou also calls it "one of the most physically beautiful countries I've ever seen in my life." The population concentrates in two cities, Muscat, the capital, and Salalah, a popular beach city, with the national pastime being desert camping. The landscape he describes is thousand-foot cliffs running straight down to the Arabian Sea, with the cities at their base: you drive up the mountains and camp on top. "It's just an incredible, a stunning kind of landscape."

The 1993 briefing they didn't want

His first visit was in 1993, to brief the Omanis on Iraq. "They didn't care about Iraq. Iraq is a world away from them," and posed them no threat. What they were worried about was Yemen, which surprised him, given that the shared border runs through the Hadhramaut, whose name he glosses from the Arabic for vegetation and dead: the border area is so hostile "that even animals can't live there."

His advice was to stop worrying: "The Yemenis are going to be busy killing each other in the coming 10 years. They're not going to be a threat to you." His assessment of how that turned out is one word, "And they weren't."

"You've never seen landscape like this before"

Asked in 2026 to name the most beautiful country he had visited, Kiriakou split the question and gave Oman the natural-beauty half outright. On the south-eastern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, it offers "Thousand-foot cliffs going right to the ocean. Incredible." He notes that Omanis camp in the desert at the top of what they call the escarpments, where "The view is unlike anything you've ever seen before in your life."

See Kiriakou on travel for the rest of his rankings.

See also

- John Kiriakou
- 2026 Iran war
- Strait of Hormuz
