The Pentagon and the Pakistani arsenal
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Asked in 2025 who actually controls Pakistan's nuclear weapons, John Kiriakou answered with what he was told a quarter of a century earlier, and then immediately qualified it.

What he was told

"When I was stationed in Pakistan in 2002 I was told unofficially that the Pentagon controlled the Pakistani nuclear arsenal, that Musharraf had turned control over to the United States, because he was afraid of exactly what you just described."

The fear in question was that the weapons might fall into the hands of people the Pakistani state could not control.

The denial

Kiriakou is careful about the age of his own information: "remember I was there 23 years ago." Over those years, he says, the Pakistanis "have come to say that is absolutely not true. The United States has nothing to do with the Pakistani nuclear arsenal, that Pakistani generals are the ones that control it."

He does not adjudicate between the two accounts. What he does is note which one alarms him: "so I don't know if that's true. If that's true, then I would be very worried about who is in charge politically in Pakistan."

Why the politics worries him

The reason follows directly. Kiriakou's assessment of Pakistani political stability is not favourable: he worries about disagreement that has "the potential to spill into the streets, because the Pakistanis have a tendency to get themselves spun up", with people dying during demonstrations, attacks on political figures, and assassinations. The country, he says, "is not known for its transformative leaders making positive decisions."

His illustration of the instability is Imran Khan, jailed, and, he notes, still wildly popular.

The judgment is consistent with how he describes the ISI generally: an organisation that was, in his experience, effectively two services at once, professional counterterrorism partners trained in Britain on one side, and on the other the same institution that created and armed the Taliban.

See also

- John Kiriakou
- ISI
- Imran Khan
- A.Q. Khan
- Pakistan Station (2002)
