The Israeli nuclear program is an open intelligence reality that both the Israeli and U.S. governments officially decline to acknowledge. John Kiriakou has described the program as an established fact within the CIA: “Of course Israel has a nuclear program.” The conventional wisdom, he said, is that Israel possesses between 120 and 220 nuclear weapons.[1]
Kiriakou offered a concrete illustration of how rigorously the official silence is maintained. A former CIA supervisor of his wrote a historical book on U.S. foreign policy in the 1950s. When the manuscript was submitted for CIA prepublication review, the only phrase the agency redacted was “Israeli nuclear program.”[2] He tells the same story elsewhere about a different friend — a retired CIA officer who churns out a book or two a year on obscure foreign-policy topics: when that manuscript went to the Publications Review Board, it too came back with only three words blacked out, “Israeli nuclear program,” and the Board told him, “It’s not our secret… It’s not up to us to protect the secrecy of Israel’s nuclear program.”[3][4]
The reason for the official denial, according to Kiriakou, is legal rather than strategic. The Glenn-Symington Act — named for Senators John Glenn and Stuart Symington — prohibits the United States from providing foreign aid of any kind to a country that possesses a nuclear weapons program and has not signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Israel is the only country in the world that meets both criteria. By maintaining a mutual fiction that Israel has no nuclear program, the United States avoids a legal obligation to cut off billions of dollars in annual aid.[5] “We can just pretend that they don’t and continue to give them billions and billions of dollars in aid,” Kiriakou said.[6]
Kiriakou described the arrangement as “not just disgraceful, it’s dishonest and it’s unfair to the American taxpayer.”[6] Asked directly where that protective directorate comes from, Kiriakou traces it to AIPAC pressure that filters down through the White House, the National Security Council, and ultimately the CIA director: “It originates with AIPAC.”[7][8]
Israeli premiers’ requests to bomb Iran
Kiriakou noted that every Israeli prime minister who visited Washington requested that the American president bomb Iran. [9]
Milchan, Netanyahu, and missing yellowcake (SaltCube)
John Kiriakou says FBI documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show that both Arnon Milchan and Benjamin Netanyahu were personally involved in smuggling U.S. nuclear secrets out of the country to support the Israeli nuclear program — and that the U.S. covered it up across administrations, as in the case of some 200 kilos of yellowcake that disappeared.[10][11]