Asked what the American and Israeli strikes had accomplished, John Kiriakou answered that in his view they accomplished nothing durable.
The judgment
“I don’t think that either the Israeli or the American attacks had any lasting effect on the Iranian nuclear program at all.”[1]
The reason
The argument is architectural. “The Iranians would never be so foolish as to have all of their eggs in one basket. There are facilities spread all over the country, most of them deep underground where these experiments are taking place.”[2]
That produces an asymmetry between what each attacker can reach and what the programme needs. “While the Americans can bomb one deep site and the Israelis can bomb other sites that are not as deep, the work continues because there are so many different sites.”[2]
Why the claims of success are made anyway
Kiriakou treats the official assessments as predictable rather than informative: “of course, to save face, the United States and Israel are going to have to say that the bombings were successful. I don’t believe that they were.”[3]
The evidence he prefers
What he offers instead of a damage assessment is a behavioural read. “Just judging by the Iranian response, where the Iranians essentially shrugged their shoulders and said, okay, you’ve bombed us, now we’re going to move on — that tells me that these bombings were not terribly successful.”[3]
The inference is that a state which had just lost something irreplaceable would not behave that way. It is the same species of reasoning Kiriakou applies elsewhere to naval movements — reading intent and damage from what a government does rather than from what it says — and it is offered, as he is careful to say of his Iran material generally, as an assessment rather than as inside knowledge.
It is also consistent with his view of the premise for the strikes in the first place: that the two national intelligence estimates written on the question over twenty years both found no Iranian nuclear weapons programme to destroy.