Hezbollah is a Lebanese Shia militant organization and political party. John Kiriakou discusses it primarily through the lens of Israeli strategy and MOSSAD operations.
Israel’s strategic goal — chaos, not victory
Per Kiriakou, Israel does not have any real intention of defeating Hezbollah outright. Instead, the goal is to turn Lebanon “into a place of chaos,” because “chaos is good if you’re Israeli.” He frames this as the same logic Israel applies to Iran — that a population fighting among itself, or preoccupied with finding food, water, and medical care, is not a population focused on fighting Israel.[1][2] He makes the same argument at greater length in his account of the broader Lebanon-Israeli conflict, predicting continued attacks and forced displacement because, in his assessment, no Israeli government will allow Lebanon to flourish as a nation.[3]
The pager operation
Kiriakou described MOSSAD’s simultaneous pager-detonation attack against Hezbollah — in which explosives concealed in pagers were activated at once — as decapitating the organization’s leadership. He called it “the most incredible operation I’ve ever seen in my life” and said “somebody at Mossad’s getting promoted today,” while acknowledging it “might be” a war crime because innocent people were killed.[4] He has repeated the assessment elsewhere, saying that the day after the operation “decapitated” Hezbollah’s leadership, the organization effectively ceased to exist as it had been.[5] Asked by a Russian news channel the next day whether the strike was a war crime, Kiriakou pointed to cases in which a Hezbollah member’s exploding pager, set down on the dinner table, killed his own nine-year-old daughter.[6] He nonetheless calls the operation one of the most brilliant acts of operational genius he has ever seen, requiring shell companies in multiple countries — including Hungary and Taiwan — to manufacture the pagers and infiltrate Hezbollah’s supply chain; the devices were reportedly around six generations old and had been sitting in that supply chain for roughly ten years before being packed with C4 and detonated.[7][8] Kiriakou says that across a CIA career that included operations work on the manhunts for Mir Aimal Kansi, Osama bin Laden, and Carlos the Jackal, he has never met anyone capable of conceiving an operation as creative as the pager attack.[9]
The severed supply line
Kiriakou treats the fall of Bashar al-Assad as the more consequential blow, because Syria was the corridor through which Hezbollah was armed and funded. Iranian weapons and cash moved across northern Iraq, across Syria and into Lebanon, with informal onward routes from Syria to Jordan or Lebanon to Hamas. With Assad gone the corridor closed: “it’s gone — like, like that, just like that, it’s gone.”[10][11]
Coming at the same moment as the Israeli decapitation campaign, the effect he described in February 2025 was a near-total operational collapse: Hassan Nasrallah killed, his replacement killed three days later, an unknown figure in charge, and roughly half the organisation’s fighters dead or wounded. His assessment was that for some time there would be “pretty much no Hezbollah, not meaningfully.”[11][12]
The Nasrallah strike
Kiriakou cited the killing of former Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah as an example of Israeli readiness to inflict mass casualties: Israel “killed 300 people in southern Lebanon when they went after Hassan Nasrallah … just blew up the entire complex. It decapitated Hezbollah. It was also a war crime.”[13]
Kiriakou has also given a broader explanation for why Hezbollah, in his phrase, “for all intents and purposes no longer exists”, locating it in a standing Israeli targeting doctrine rather than in the pager operation alone. Precision, he argues, is beside the point: “if they want to kill you and you’re in an apartment block, they’ll take the entire city block out and kill 2,000 people if they think they can get you.” Asked whether that is an attitude within the Israeli military or a policy set by the political leadership, he answered that it is policy.[14] He expects the organisation to reconstitute, remarking that it “will again in six months.”[15]
Beirut embassy and barracks bombings
Kiriakou notes that Hezbollah, whatever its current political standing, has a violent history with the United States: it bombed the American embassy in Beirut twice and bombed the Marine Corps barracks there, killing hundreds of Americans including several of his own CIA colleagues. He says the group is nonetheless now a legitimate political entity and a major parliamentary force in Lebanon.[16]
Saudi Hezbollah — a different, smaller group
Kiriakou is careful to distinguish Saudi Hezbollah, a small and largely powerless group of perhaps a couple of dozen men who hate the Saudi royal family for oppressing them, from Kuwaiti Hezbollah and from the much larger Lebanese/Syrian Hezbollah.[17] He says Saudi Arabia pressured the U.S. and FBI director Louis Freeh to pin the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing on Iran and Saudi Hezbollah, despite the attack actually having been carried out by al-Qaeda, which took credit for it; Kiriakou argues Saudi Hezbollah never had the firepower for a blast that shattered windows across the water at his own house and left a crater 35 feet deep.[18][19]
The kidnapping of William Buckley
Kiriakou has also discussed Hezbollah’s 1984 kidnapping of CIA Beirut station chief William Buckley, saying the group used Buckley as a bargaining chip and a punching bag for seven months, making no secret that they were torturing him: “Breaking him was the whole point of the exercise.”[20]
The New York storefront (Tucker Carlson, 2026)
John Kiriakou recounted driving down First Avenue in New York with two FBI agents while still at the CIA. One pointed to a storefront and said: “That’s the headquarters of Hezbollah’s cell in New York.” Kiriakou asked why they didn’t do something about it — “They’re a terrorist group… go kick the door down and grab them.” The agents “just kept driving.” He uses the anecdote to argue that publicized ‘terror cells’ are rarely the imminent threat they are presented as: if they were, authorities would simply arrest them.[21][22]
The Kuwaiti presence in the early 1980s
Kiriakou describes a third national setting for the organisation’s name. There was a Hezbollah presence in Kuwait in the early 1980s, he says, and the Kuwaiti royal family reacted with a very heavy hand — going in and literally flattening with bulldozers the entire Shia neighbourhood in which the cell had established itself, killing people and arresting many more.[23]
He raises the episode not as an account of the organisation but as the violent origin of what he elsewhere presents as the region’s one successful sectarian settlement, the royal family having turned almost immediately afterwards to rebuilding relations with the community it had just attacked.[24]
2026: harder than expected
John Kiriakou’s assessment of Hezbollah during the 2026 fighting held two things together without resolving them. On one hand “Hezbollah’s putting up a tougher fight than the Israelis had expected”; on the other, “not to say that Hezbollah’s winning, they’re not. They’re getting creamed. But they’re fighting back.”[25]
The civilian consequence he attached to it was almost a million Lebanese internally displaced with nowhere to go, “because they’re surrounded by Syria on two sides, Israel on one, and the Mediterranean Sea on the fourth.”[26] The displacement is treated at South Lebanon displacement, 2026.