Israeli foreknowledge of 9/11 is a position John Kiriakou states as his own belief and labels as speculation, arrived at by working backwards from an arrest pattern he considers otherwise unexplained.
The arrests
Dozens of Israeli citizens were arrested by NYPD officers on 11 September 2001 and in the days that followed — mostly for photographing sensitive sites, including the World Trade Center, or for comments they made about the attacks — and held on suspicion of something national-security related. The Israelis then came to the United States, said the men were theirs, and asked for them to be released.[1][2]
Kiriakou is careful that the release itself is unremarkable. Normal practice when an American officer is caught in a friendly country is public denial and a private request from the station chief to the head of service; the person may be made to cool his heels for a week or two, but he is let go.[3] “Yes, that actually is normal.”[3]
The inference
What he does not consider normal is the presence. His stated belief is that Israel had infiltrated al-Qaeda, knew the attack was coming, and did not say so — and that the men were in position to document what was about to happen. The motive he assigns is that Israel knew an attacked America would overreact: a war lasting twenty years, two million Muslims killed, roughly six trillion dollars spent. “Just like they knew chaos in Iraq was good for Israel, chaos in Libya was good for Israel, chaos in Syria was good for Israel, and now chaos in Iran is good for Israel.”[4][5][6][2]
What the CIA was asking for
The context Kiriakou supplies is his own. On 6 July 2001 he was entertaining a group of Middle Eastern intelligence officers when Cofer Black, director of the Counterterrorism Center, came into the meeting and minced no words: something terrible was going to happen, on a massive scale; they did not know what, where or when. Black ended by saying, “I’m begging you” — if you have any sources inside al-Qaeda, please help us.[7][8]
The agency had no sources inside al-Qaeda of its own, which is why it needed liaison. The other Arab countries did not have them either; the Gulf states did not; the Pakistanis either did not or would not say. “And the Israelis just sat back and waited for it all to happen and then came and said, ‘We are one with you, America.’”[8][9]
The dancing Israelis
Asked in a 2026 keynote what he made of the men filmed apparently celebrating in New Jersey on the morning of the attacks, Kiriakou did not dispute the description; he disputed the inference usually drawn from it. “Of course they were dancing. You bet they were dancing because they knew exactly what 9/11 meant.” What it meant, in his account, was that the United States would feel compelled to go overseas and kill as many Muslims as it possibly could — “Of course they were dancing in the streets. That’s exactly what they wanted to happen. Exactly what they wanted to happen. And it’s what happened.”[10]
He treats Afghanistan as the part of that outcome which was not sufficient on its own. When killing Afghans and a handful of al-Qaeda members proved not to be enough, he says, the Iraq war was “engineered” with Dick Cheney, David Addington, Scooter Libby “and all of the other war criminals who were working either at the White House or at the Pentagon at the time.”[11]
’All of that was true. All of it.’
Kiriakou’s fullest defence of the dancing-Israelis account is a rebuttal of the idea that it is a fabrication. “A lot of people think that that is just some anti-semitic trope that somebody made up. No. There were Israeli intelligence officers in New York in the weeks before 9/11 who were indeed arrested taking pictures of the World Trade Center and then dancing after it was hit.”[12]
He recounts the exchange with the arresting officers as he understands it — the men insisting “no, no, no, we’re the good guys, it’s the Muslims that did this” — against the obvious question: “Why are you taking pictures all week long of the World Trade Center and then just standing there waiting for planes to hit it, and then you’re dancing in the streets?”[12]
The resolution he describes is diplomatic rather than judicial. The Israeli government came to Washington and asked for the men’s release, and “quietly, in the aftermath of 9/11 — where the country’s on fire and people are losing their minds — we just let them all go.”[13]
What followed, on his account, was a campaign: “the Israelis worked very hard to discredit the story that there ever were any dancing Israelis, or that the Israelis were spying on us, or that the Israelis had intelligence officers in New York City the week of the 9/11 attacks. But all of that was true. All of it.”[14]
The inference from competence
Kiriakou’s argument for foreknowledge rests on his estimate of the service rather than on any document. He states the Saudi and Israeli positions separately: that he believes the Saudi government was “at least indirectly involved” in the attacks, and that the Israeli government “had forewarning.”[14]
The reasoning for the second is professional respect. “The Israelis are really, really good at what they do. They’re very good spies. Mossad is probably the best intelligence service on the planet. Undoubtedly they had penetrations of al-Qaeda. They knew that attack was coming and they never told us. And I want to know why.”[15]
What Netanyahu understood
Kiriakou attributes much of the post-attack framing of the Middle East to a deliberate reading of American temperament. Netanyahu, he says, saw 9/11 — and the invasion of Iraq a year and a half later — as “the greatest thing that ever happened for Israel,” because “he knew as soon as the first plane hit the World Trade what the American response was going to be. It was going to be to go to the region and kill as many Muslims as we possibly could kill.”[16][17]
The channel he names is the neoconservative circle around Dick Cheney — Richard Perle, Scooter Libby and others — through whom, “knowing the iron was hot,” the suggestion could be put in the vice president’s ear that the next attack had to be against Iraq.[18]
Kiriakou dates Perle’s approach to the day after: on 12 September, Perle — whom he notes never became a Republican and remains a registered Democrat, like the Scoop Jackson staff he came up with in his twenties — went to the White House and said “you know, we have to attack Iraq, right?”[19]
The remaining work was persuasion: convincing Americans that Saddam Hussein was tied to al-Qaeda, “now we all knew that Osama bin Laden hated Saddam Hussein as much as he hated the United States. There’s nothing Muslim about Saddam Hussein.” His illustration is the umrah Saddam performed in the late 1980s with his vice president Izzat Ibrahim, at which he did not know the prayers — Ibrahim kneeling just behind him to whisper them loudly enough to be repeated.[20][21]
The accounting he gives for the twenty years that followed: “we killed more than two million people in the region. Are we safer because of it? I don’t think so. Not in the long term.”[21]
Not an inside job
Kiriakou’s foreknowledge argument is regularly mistaken for a broader theory of the attacks, and a May 2026 exchange has him separating the two in consecutive answers. Asked whether he believed 9/11 was an inside job, his answer was “No” — flatly, and repeated. Asked whether it was therefore a terrorist attack by al-Qaeda, his answer was “Yes.”[22]
Only then does he add the qualification he has made his own, and he adds it unprompted: “I think that the Israelis knew it was coming and didn’t warn us because they knew that if we were attacked, we would end up doing what they wanted and just go around the world kill Muslims, which is exactly what happened.”[22]
The sequence matters to how he frames the claim. Foreknowledge, in his account, is a charge about what a friendly service withheld — not a claim about who flew the planes, and not a substitute for al-Qaeda’s authorship of the attack.[22]
Asked the compound question directly in July 2026 — whether the CIA or the Mossad played any part, or at least had prior knowledge — he separated the two the same way, and added one detail he does not always give: that the service knew not only that an attack was coming but that it “would likely be in New York.” On the arrested men he hedges the count rather than the conclusion — “18, 36, however many it was” — while treating their identity as settled: held several weeks, then released, “obviously Mossad agents.” His statement of the belief is unchanged: “I do not believe that the Mossad was involved in the 9/11 attacks. What I believe is that the Mossad had infiltrated al-Qaeda, knew that the attacks were coming … and purposely didn’t tell us because they knew that our response would be that we would kill 2 million Muslims in the next 20 years, which is exactly what we did. And that benefited Israeli foreign policy.”[23][24][25]