The theory behind the campaign is the one Kiriakou says Benjamin Netanyahu and other Iran hawks have argued for years: apply enough pressure, weaken the security apparatus, and the Iranian people will rise and overthrow the government.[1] Trump’s first speech announcing the war addressed the Iranian people directly — “Rise up. Now is your time.”[1]
Kiriakou sets that against what had happened weeks earlier. Iranian police had suppressed protests in January, killing by many estimates 30,000 civilians — “The Israelis say it was 80,000” — and the United States had condemned it.[2][3] He states the sequence deliberately and then repeats it: “We jumped up and down when the Iranians killed protesters… and we decided to start killing Iranian law enforcement officers, police, and domestic security.”[3][4]
Method and attribution
The method is targeted rather than aerial: “We’re not talking about bombing police stations. That’s not happening. We’re talking about assassins and saboteurs on the ground.”[5] His attribution rests on capability and on advertising — the operatives are “likely Israelis, because the US doesn’t have a presence inside Iran, and the Israelis brag about the extent of their presence, and they are assassinating individual policemen.”[5] He cites the Iranian president confirming attacks on individual officers in an address to the National Security Council, and reports the president’s own comparison: that the Americans and Israelis did the same in Afghanistan and in Iraq, as “part of the arsenal of operations” both states carry out.[4][6]
The result
Kiriakou’s assessment is that the campaign inverted its own purpose: “instead of leading to the immediate collapse of this country, we have unified Iranians on the ground, whether they were pro-regime or anti-regime.”[6][7] He files it under the conclusion he says he drew from the Iraq war while still at the CIA: “we are never seen as liberators. We’re seen as attackers and occupiers.”[7] His verdict on the war follows directly: “I think the time is beyond ready to end this thing.”[8]