Asked in 2025 who actually controls Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, John Kiriakou answered with what he was told a quarter of a century earlier, and then immediately qualified it.
What he was told
“When I was stationed in Pakistan in 2002 I was told unofficially that the Pentagon controlled the Pakistani nuclear arsenal — that Musharraf had turned control over to the United States, because he was afraid of exactly what you just described.”[1]
The fear in question was that the weapons might fall into the hands of people the Pakistani state could not control.
The denial
Kiriakou is careful about the age of his own information: “remember I was there 23 years ago.” Over those years, he says, the Pakistanis “have come to say that is absolutely not true. The United States has nothing to do with the Pakistani nuclear arsenal — that Pakistani generals are the ones that control it.”[2]
He does not adjudicate between the two accounts. What he does is note which one alarms him: “so I don’t know if that’s true. If that’s true, then I would be very worried about who is in charge politically in Pakistan.”[2]
Keeping a war non-nuclear
Kiriakou has described what Washington did during the most recent India–Pakistan fighting, and here he does not hedge. “I can tell you definitively,” he says, that the State Department was telling both sides: “if you’re going to fight, fight. Keep it short and keep it non-nuclear.” If nuclear weapons were introduced, in his framing, the whole world changes — and he believes there was restraint on both sides.[3][4]
His underlying judgement is that the arithmetic never favours Pakistan. “Literally nothing good will come of an actual war between India and Pakistan, because the Pakistanis will lose” — and he is explicit that he means a conventional war, not a nuclear one.[3][4]
Strategic patience
What has changed over two decades, in his account, is the Indian half of the equation. At the CIA the Indian posture was called strategic patience: after an attack the Indian government would have been perfectly within its rights to strike Pakistan, and did not. Kiriakou remembers people at the White House saying the Indians were exhibiting a very mature foreign policy — the strike had been expected — and credits that restraint with keeping the world from what might have been a nuclear exchange.[5][6]
That patience, he says, has reached its limit: India cannot risk it being misunderstood as weakness, and so had to respond. The question he thinks CIA analysts are now asking is whether the Pakistanis have learned not to keep poking the hornets’ nest and expecting not to be stung.[6][7]
Why the politics worries him
The reason follows directly. Kiriakou’s assessment of Pakistani political stability is not favourable: he worries about disagreement that has “the potential to spill into the streets, because the Pakistanis have a tendency to get themselves spun up” — with people dying during demonstrations, attacks on political figures, and assassinations. The country, he says, “is not known for its transformative leaders making positive decisions.”[8]
His illustration of the instability is Imran Khan — jailed, and, he notes, still wildly popular.[2]
The judgment is consistent with how he describes the ISI generally: an organisation that was, in his experience, effectively two services at once — professional counterterrorism partners trained in Britain on one side, and on the other the same institution that created and armed the Taliban.