The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was the 2015 agreement limiting Iran”s nuclear programme in exchange for sanctions relief. John Kiriakou”s assessment of it is unqualified: “the JCPOA was a good idea. The JCPOA worked.”[1]
The monitoring regime
The detail he adds in its defence concerns verification, and its precedent. “The monitoring mechanism that was called for in the JCPOA was exactly the same monitoring mechanism that the United Nations used in Iraq — the same lead seals, the same surveillance cameras, the same inspection regime. And it was working. It was working for the two or three years that it was actually in place. We decided to walk away from that, and that”s a shame.”[1][2]
The bind the withdrawal created
Kiriakou identifies a self-inflicted legal problem in the exit. “US law says that we have to impose sanctions on any country that does business with Iran. Well, under the JCPOA everybody was doing business with Iran — including the British, the French, the Germans, the Japanese, everybody.” The American decision, he notes, did not bind the other signatories: “just because Donald Trump decided that we were going to pull out doesn”t necessarily mean, in our allies” thinking, that now they should pull out as well or risk being punished.”[2][3]
The French, on his account, called the bluff first: “look, if you want to pull out, go ahead and pull out — but we”re not pulling out. We”re signatories to this agreement too. And if you want to sanction us, then go ahead and sanction us.” His one-line coda: “and of course we haven”t.”[3]
The attempt to return
“In the first year or so of the Biden administration it seemed like there was enough of a desire on the part of the US government to want to re-enter the JCPOA, and so we engaged the Iranians in talks. Those talks went very poorly. Not much was agreed upon, and in the end both sides just gave up. It was a bilateral decision — we just gave up. So relations are not good.”[4]
The terms, as he lists them
Debating Iran’s lead nuclear negotiator on Al Mayadeen two days before the 2026 attack, Kiriakou argued that what the two sides were then negotiating was the JCPOA under another name, and set out the terms to prove it: that Iran could not enrich uranium to weapons grade; that the enriched material and Iran’s nuclear sites had to be open to IAEA inspection; and that any enriched uranium had to be stored in a third country, with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey under consideration.[5][6]
His point was that none of this was new to Tehran — Iran “had agreed to it 15 years ago with Barack Obama” — and that the agreement had been scrapped unilaterally on the American side.[6]
The single Iranian refusal was not nuclear at all: “The only thing the Iranians did not agree to was scrapping their uh medium-range standard conventional missiles.” Kiriakou treated that as reasonable rather than obstructive — “no country in its right mind would ever agree to” it.[6][7]
He was also unsentimental about what a renewed deal would have bought: putting the attack “off for another couple of years. That’s all it would do, maybe.”[7]
The compliance record
Separately in the same broadcast he made the case for Iranian good faith from the revolution forward. Iran’s answer to the central American demand had been consistent since 1979 — “No worries. We don’t want to develop nuclear weapons” — and Kiriakou’s evidence is a decision Tehran did not have to make: “They voluntarily kept the um their membership in the nuclear non-proliferation pact that the Shah had signed. They didn’t have to. They could have said, ‘We just had a revolution. We don’t have to keep this old treaty obligation.’ But, they did.”[8][9]