The Saudi nuclear program predates John Kiriakou’s career: when he arrived at the CIA in 1990, Saudi Arabia’s pursuit of the ability to enrich uranium was already old news, the kingdom having sought nuclear power since the 1980s.[1]
Kiriakou treats the stated rationale as implausible on its own terms. Saudi Arabia is the sunniest country in the world and has little solar generation; it is windy in the desert and there is little wind power; it has large bodies of water on two sides and little tidal power. “Why nuclear?”[2] The conventional wisdom, he says, has always been that the Saudis want a nuclear weapon — and senior former CIA officers have claimed over the years that they already have one, purchased from the Pakistanis.[3]
He raised the subject in July 2026 on reporting that the United States and Saudi Arabia had agreed a nuclear power deal, describing it as a story breaking very slowly that most mainstream outlets were not really examining.[1][3]
The quid pro quo, and the missing half
Kiriakou dates his own knowledge of Saudi intent to his first days at the agency: “one of the first things I learned when I joined the CIA in January of 1990 was that the Saudis had long been seeking a nuclear bomb.”[4]
The funding relationship he describes is exceptional in scale: “the Saudis are more generous with Pakistan than with any other country on the planet — to the point where the city of Faisalabad, a city of some 7 or 8 million people in east-central Pakistan, was named after Saudi King Faisal because of his generosity. The Saudis gave the Pakistanis as much money as they needed to develop a nuclear bomb, as a counter to the Indians.”[5]
What he infers from it: “I always assumed, as Dewey Clarridge did, that the Pakistanis shared those nuclear bombs with the Saudis. I believe that was the quid pro quo.”[6]
He then names the part he cannot answer, and does not pretend to: “the question then is, do they have a delivery system? Do they have a missile capable of carrying a nuclear device? I think the answer is probably no — but impossible to say.”[6]