Ex-CIA officer John Kiriakou discusses the Iran war, false flags, and the state of US intelligence
Tucker Carlson interviews former CIA officer John Kiriakou on the Tucker Carlson channel.
Summary
John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer and whistleblower, joins Tucker Carlson to discuss the US war with Iran, the intelligence failures that preceded it, and the broader dysfunction of American foreign policy. Kiriakou argues that the decision to attack Iran was driven primarily by Israeli interests rather than US national security, noting that two separate National Intelligence Estimates — representing all 18 US intelligence agencies — concluded unanimously that Iran had no nuclear weapons program. He contends that the false claim of an Iranian nuclear threat originated with Israel, not with American intelligence, and that the president chose to believe Israeli intelligence over his own agencies.
Kiriakou recounts a firsthand account of the Principals Committee meeting held the night before the 2003 Iraq invasion, in which General Tommy Franks stated that if all went well the US could be 'in Tehran by August,' prompting CIA Director George Tenet to turn off his microphone and ask Kiriakou in disbelief whether Franks had said Tehran or Baghdad. Kiriakou uses this story to illustrate that the ambition to attack Iran is not new and has long been disconnected from strategic reality.
He also discusses the suspicious shutdown of leads in both the Charlie Kirk assassination investigation and the Butler assassination attempt, suggesting someone prevented proper follow-up on those leads.
Kiriakou further discusses Reza Pahlavi, the Shah's son, arguing that his promotion as a viable opposition leader was entirely manufactured, driven by Israeli interest in restoring the pre-1979 Iran–Israel relationship, and that Pahlavi has no meaningful support inside Iran and has himself expressed ambivalence about returning.
The conversation covers CIA politicization, the Israeli lobby's stranglehold on US foreign policy, the US government's deliberate tolerance of Afghan heroin production to destabilize Iran and Russia, the rehabilitation of the MEK from designated terror group to US-backed proxy, and Kiriakou's own ongoing effort to obtain a presidential pardon.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
How the US went to war with Iran — and who wasn't consulted
Tucker Carlson: John, thanks for doing this.
John Kiriakou: Thanks for the invitation.
Tucker Carlson: A lot of us have been trying to figure out how we got into this war with Iran. I think the reporting is clear at this point that there was really nobody at the White House or in the American intelligence community who was telling the president this is going to be really easy. But he came to that conclusion anyway. There's a lot of speculation as to why. Tell us about the process. You're the president. You're trying to figure out what's going to happen if you declare war on this country. How do you find that? Where does that come from?
John Kiriakou: I can tell you how President George H.W. Bush did it and how President George W. Bush did it. It's a formal process. You commission estimates from the intelligence community. You commission finished intelligence reports from the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence. You get an idea of what the State Department is thinking. You're talking to your secretaries of state and defense, the national security advisor. But then — and I think this is equally important — you need to talk to your friends and allies. You need to know what the European countries are saying or seeing. And then our Gulf allies, the Arab allies — we really needed to engage with all of them. There's going to be a consensus at some point, at least among most of those countries, and then you come up with a policy.
I think that's not what took place in this case. As you know, you've heard the same criticisms I've heard in the Gulf. The complaints are that they were not consulted as allies. They were just sort of brought along. I was in Europe a couple of weeks ago and a couple of weeks before that, and I heard the same complaints — that they weren't consulted. The only apparent consultation that was taking place was with the Israelis, and the Israelis really, really wanted this to get done.
Tucker Carlson: So why would you, as a practical matter, need to consult other countries? There is this sense that as an exceptional nation, we don't need anyone's permission to act. But again, not as an ideological matter or a matter of politeness, but as a practical matter before launching a war — why do you need to talk to Europeans and Gulf states?
John Kiriakou: At the very least, you're going to want political cover. You're also going to want to give them an opportunity to come up with a plan B for their oil or gas needs or transportation issues. You don't want them to be taken by surprise because they're going to resent you in the end. And we didn't do that, and they resent us.
I'll give you an example. I was in Ireland two weeks ago and at the hotel they told me I was probably going to have to leave extra early for the airport because they were expecting the largest demonstration in Irish history. Which took place the next morning, and it was all because of home heating oil prices and gasoline prices. We didn't consult with the Irish or the British or anybody else before launching this thing. They were already having problems because of the cutoff of home heating oil coming from Russia because of the Ukraine war, and then this was just doubly difficult for them. Gas was twelve and a half dollars a gallon, and home heating oil was astronomical to the point where people were just freezing. And they're blaming us for it. So you want to be able to consult our friends and allies so that they have a chance to come up with a plan to make the hurt on their own people a little bit less severe.
Tucker Carlson: Ireland is an enemy of Israel's. The prime minister and many cabinet ministers in Israel have said that they hate Ireland, they hate Europe, they hate Europeans. Do you think the president's failure to bring them into this conversation reflects Israel's priorities?
John Kiriakou: I hate to say it, but I do. I think the Israelis — look, I understand what a close friend and ally Israel is and always has been. I get it. But I feel like sometimes we act in Israel's best interests rather than in our own best interests. I think this is one of those cases. The Israelis, of course, are going to jump up and down and yell about the Irish and Spanish and the Italians. But we should let them vent and then do what's in the best interest of the United States. And I feel like we're not really doing that. We're doing Israel's bidding.
Tucker Carlson: Have you seen this before? There's always been pressure to help Israel, to go along with its priorities. But have you seen other instances when you served in government where the United States government put Israel's interests above those of the United States?
John Kiriakou: No, in fact, to the contrary. In the Gulf War — the 1990–91 Gulf War — and again in the Iraq War from 2003 onward, we specifically made decisions that were in the best interests of the United States, to the point where the Israelis complained vociferously that they wanted us to do A and instead we did B because B was better for the United States. And we would say, well, that's foreign policy. You have your interests, we have our interests. There's no such thing as permanent friends. There is such a thing as permanent interests. This is our interest and this is what we're going to do.
That just doesn't seem to be the case today. I don't understand how attacking Iran was in US national interests. I fully understand how this was in Israel's interest. The Israelis have long wanted us to attack Iran and to overthrow the regime in Tehran. I get that it's in their interests. But I've never believed — I don't think any CIA officer past or present believes or has believed — that the Iranians were anywhere near a nuclear weapon. They don't have a delivery system that could deliver a nuclear weapon to the United States. And when you've got two National Intelligence Estimates — a National Intelligence Estimate being the sense of the entire intelligence community, all 18 organizations within the US intelligence community — unanimously concluding that there is no Iranian nuclear weapons program, twice, as well as the Ayatollah Khamenei issuing a fatwa in 2003 declaring it a sin to develop a nuclear weapon, and then the CIA twice saying they don't have a nuclear weapons program — it's quite something.
Tucker Carlson: So the fatwa has been in place all these years, more than 20 years. We're told simultaneously that Iran is a fanatical, suicidal, homicidal theocracy, totally beyond reason, so besotted are they by their crazy religious views. But we also can't take the fatwas seriously because it's Iran. But sometimes you can take things seriously. It's one or the other — either it's a country that issues fatwas and takes them seriously, and therefore we should be afraid of them because they're a theocracy, or it's a country that issues fake fatwas because they don't really believe in the idea of a fatwa. What is it?
John Kiriakou: God forgive me for quoting Hillary Clinton, but I'm going to quote Hillary Clinton. She said when she was secretary of state that she had come to the realization that Iran was not a theocracy. It was a military dictatorship. There was this theocratic group that sort of sat on top of the heap, but the day-to-day operation of the country was run by the IRGC. And the IRGC, being a military organization, was going to run the country as a military dictatorship would. I think we should have addressed it that way. We shouldn't have gotten wrapped around the axle on theocratic issues. We shouldn't have been afraid to engage the Iranians — or maybe not even afraid, just refusing to engage them. We should have been constantly engaged, whether it was through the Qataris or the Omanis or even the Algerians. There were different ways in which we could speak with the Iranians and we just never bothered.
I do not have rose-colored glasses when thinking about the Iranians. I know what the Iranians have done. The Iranians made an attempt to kill me several decades ago. I haven't forgotten that. I know that they're bad guys. I know they've carried out terrorist attacks and that they've killed Americans in many of those attacks. But we're talking single digits over the last several decades. Support for Hezbollah in the 80s and 90s — yes, very bad, very big problem. The Houthis are a bit of a thorn in our side. The Hamas thing — the CIA was late to the game on Hamas because the analytic judgment for a long time was, incorrectly, that the Iranians were not supporting Hamas because the Iranians are Shia Muslim and Hamas is Sunni Muslim. That was wrong. They were supporting Hamas. I get all that. But Hamas has never carried out an anti-American terrorist attack. So was it in US national interests to attack Iran for supporting Hamas? I think not.
Tucker Carlson: Hamas is designated a terror group in the US. But Hamas has never carried out a terror attack against Americans?
John Kiriakou: We spend a lot of time talking about Hamas. And the Muslim Brotherhood, which also has never carried out a terrorist attack on Americans. I'm not for either one, just for the record.
Tucker Carlson: Nor am I. But why do we talk about both so much?
John Kiriakou: It's been my experience — I first came to this realization when I first joined the CIA — we always have this need to have a boogeyman. Whether it was Bolshevism in the 1910s, socialism in the twenties and early thirties, Nazism — legitimately so — but then in the 70s and 80s it became Islamism. It's like we always have to have an enemy to rally around.
Afghanistan, heroin, and deliberate destabilization
Tucker Carlson: Everywhere I go, I meet people who are addicted to drugs, who've lost loved ones. I know a bunch of people who've died of drug overdoses, and I see a country that's been gravely damaged if not destroyed by narcotics being imported by Latin American drug cartels. If you're looking for an enemy, there it is right there, with a death count. That seems like the one.
John Kiriakou: May I tell you a story? When I was the senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 2009 to 2011, I told the then-chairman, John Kerry, I wanted to go to Afghanistan to do a formal Senate study on the heroin poppy crop. Afghanistan at the time was producing 93% of the world's heroin. So I flew to Afghanistan, went to Bagram Air Base, and told them I needed to fly to Kandahar and then to Lashkar Gah, which is the capital of Helmand province. As a senior congressional staff member, I had the rank of brigadier general. This is the only time in my life I ever pulled rank on somebody. They wouldn't take me down there, and I said, I'm not asking you. I'm telling you — you are going to fly me to Kandahar and then we will fly to Lashkar Gah and then fly back to Bagram. So they relented.
We went to Kandahar, did some meetings. When we got to Lashkar Gah, as you're landing, for as far as the eye could see, all you see is heroin poppy. I said I want to go into the poppy fields and find a farmer. So I had security, I had a Pashto translator. We drove out into the fields and stumbled on a poppy farmer. I asked him a very naive question. I said, instead of poppy, why don't you grow things that have two growing seasons, like tomatoes or onions or pomegranates? And he said, the Americans told me in 2001 that if I told them where the Arabs were, I could grow all the poppy I wanted. I said, what Americans told you you could grow poppy? And just as I said the question, my military handler pulled me by the arm and said, we're under threat, we have to go back to the base. I never got an answer. We got back into the Jeep and they took me back to the helicopter.
I come back to Washington and said to the chief investigator, I'm onto something here. This is not good. So I wrote it all up just as I collected it. I had a friend at the DEA and I called him. I said, I'm going to send you a paper, eyes only. I just want your thoughts on it before I send it to John Kerry. He calls me back a couple of days later and says, buddy, you're not going to get this paper published. I said, why not? He said, Afghanistan produces 93% of the world's heroin. Almost all of that heroin goes to Iran and Russia, and we want them to be addicted to heroin — it weakens their societies. And I never got it published.
Tucker Carlson: That's disgusting.
John Kiriakou: Fast forward years later — we've got a fentanyl epidemic in this country. That fentanyl is coming from China and Mexico. They want us to be addicted to fentanyl because it weakens our society. And that's why we're in the predicament that we're in.
Tucker Carlson: So you believe that the US government allowed poppy production in Afghanistan in order to weaken Iran and Russia?
John Kiriakou: I do. And the reason I've come to that conclusion is not because I'm any smarter than anybody else. Do you know how much of the world's heroin was produced in Afghanistan in the last year of Taliban rule, in 2000? Zero. None. Not only did they not grow any heroin poppy in 2000, they were a net food exporter to Iran and to Pakistan. And as soon as we took over, it was all about the heroin.
Tucker Carlson: Does anyone in a meeting where these plans are formulated say, you know, we're the United States — we can't flood other people's countries with heroin. That's just so immoral.
John Kiriakou: I never sat in a meeting like that. The meetings were all about how do we win, how do we get a leg up, how do we implement the policy that we want whatever country to follow. That was it.
Tucker Carlson: But if you intentionally flood other people's countries with heroin, it's kind of hard to tell yourself you're the good guy.
John Kiriakou: Tucker, that was something I struggled with for at least half of my career at the CIA. We're supposed to be the good guys. So why are we doing so much of this? I just never understood it.
Tucker Carlson: What do you think the answer is?
John Kiriakou: The answer was that I had stars in my eyes. I was not fully understanding of realpolitik.
Tucker Carlson: Even if there was a good reason to have Russia as an enemy, I still wouldn't be for flooding their cities with heroin. Right after the Russians invaded Ukraine, I was one of seven independent journalists who were invited to lunch with the Russian ambassador in Washington. What he wanted was our ideas on how the US and Russia could continue to cooperate diplomatically even during a time of war. And I was actually proud of what I said. I went prepared and I said the US and Russia have identical interests in counterterrorism, counter-proliferation, and counter-narcotics. We should never stop cooperating on those three issues.
John Kiriakou: We have almost no US ambassadors in the six GCC countries — Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates. Most of them were relieved of their duties a year ago and have never been replaced. So there is no Philip Habib to go from country to country right now as there was in the 1980s.
Tucker Carlson: Why do we have no ambassadors in our most important allies?
John Kiriakou: I think the president concluded that these ambassadors were not fully bought into his foreign policy and he withdrew them short of tour. They were all professional diplomats, career diplomats, not political appointees. And the department just never named new ambassadors.
Tucker Carlson: It almost seems like this is an intentional effort to destroy the United States by our own government.
John Kiriakou: It feels that way, doesn't it.
The drug cartels, terrorism designations, and CIA priorities
Tucker Carlson: Just back to the focus of counterterrorism — really the focus of the entire US government — it has been on Islamic extremism, on Israel's enemies, for over 20 years now. You don't see a mobilization of men and money to fight the drug cartels who are responsible, objectively, for so many more deaths in our country. Does anyone ever bring that up and say, wait a second, we have a hundred thousand people dying a year because of these?
John Kiriakou: On the contrary, the CIA used to be called the Counter-Narcotics Center. Now it's called the Crime and Narcotics Center, and that is the graveyard where people's careers go to die. The CIA doesn't care about stopping the flow of drugs. They just don't care. You know this wonderful show on Netflix, Narcos? In seasons one and two, just as the DEA is going to go in and grab Pablo Escobar or grab the gentlemen of Cali, the CIA station chief comes in and just screws the whole thing up. That's in that show because that's what happens in real life. The CIA at the time cared only about communism and stopping communism. And if the drug cartels were going to tell the CIA where the communists were hiding, then the CIA was okay with the drug cartels. And that attitude has really never changed.
Tucker Carlson: Why do you think that is? It doesn't make any sense.
John Kiriakou: It's old thinking, Tucker. Instead of saying our job is to disrupt any threat to the United States — which is what I thought the job was — their view is our job is to disrupt any Islamist, communist, fascist, or foreign official challenge to the United States, whether it's governmental or an organized terrorist group. They're just not thinking about the cartel.
Tucker Carlson: It sounds like they're doing what all organizations do ultimately, which is to protect themselves.
John Kiriakou: It's all about kingdom building. I will say — I wrote a piece when President Trump first declared that the drug cartels would be reclassified as foreign terrorist groups, and everybody was laughing and making fun of how silly this was. I said, no, no, no, you're underestimating him. He knows exactly what he's doing. It's not that he's doing this for the PR of naming the cartels as terrorist groups. He's doing it because legally it frees up some agencies' abilities to act unilaterally against the cartels, and it frees up a great deal of money to be used by CIA, NSA, and DOD against the cartels. So I said, this is a big deal. This is not window dressing.
Tucker Carlson: Did it have any effect?
John Kiriakou: Not yet. Frankly, the army of people that we put against terrorism after 9/11 is what we need to do against drugs. It's hard to think that that could happen now, considering that all resources of government — certainly all attention in government — is focused on Iran.
Tucker Carlson: I think that's the most important point. There's just no bandwidth for anything, and the demands of a war, especially one that you're losing — which we are by any real measurement — they're so overwhelming. There's no time to think about anything else.
John Kiriakou: In the '91 Gulf War and in '03, the State Department initiated this policy called burden sharing. Really what it was was a nice way of saying we want all of our allies to pay for this, but it worked. The Kuwaitis in 1990 — the year they were invaded by Iraq — for the very first time in their history, they made more from their investments than they made from oil. So they had this bottomless pit of money. They paid for most of the liberation of their own country, but the Europeans also paid. And so it ended up not costing us anything. We went down the burden sharing road again in 2003, and a lot of it came out of our own pockets, but our European and Gulf allies also paid for it. This time nobody was consulted. And so this is all coming from our own pockets. And I think that's unsustainable over the long term.
The nuclear weapons claim — where it came from and why it's false
Tucker Carlson: At the beginning of the war, the president said we destroyed Iran's nuclear program. But you're saying there was no nuclear program.
John Kiriakou: There was no nuclear program. They had partially enriched uranium, certainly, which under the NPT they're allowed to do. It's subject to United Nations inspection. They were not in violation. There was no nuclear weapons program.
Tucker Carlson: So we destroyed the nuclear weapons program, which doesn't exist. But then in February, we were told again that the nuclear weapons program is absolutely real, that the threat is imminent. People go on television and say Iran can lob an ICBM into Miami and obliterate the United States.
John Kiriakou: That is also not true, and a lot of people are saying it. The Iranians did something recently that was interesting — they took two of their medium-range missiles, stripped them down to the point where it was just the missile and the engine, nothing inside them, just to see how much distance they could get. And they made it almost to Diego Garcia, which is far. So if you instead point them toward Europe, yes, without anything inside these missiles, they could reach Western Europe. But that's not a delivery system. That's just smoke and mirrors. They can only go that far if they're completely empty. If you weigh them down with explosives, or God forbid with nuclear material, even if it's just to make a dirty bomb, they can't get that far. They could get to Cyprus. They could certainly get to Israel and easily to the Arab Gulf countries, but there was no threat to the United States.
Tucker Carlson: Did anybody in those 18 agencies say to the president, this is a major threat, the nuclear program in Iran?
John Kiriakou: The people that I still talk to at the agency say specifically no.
Tucker Carlson: So that information — that lie — came from Israel?
John Kiriakou: Yes.
Tucker Carlson: Why would a president believe a foreign intel agency before his own?
John Kiriakou: I don't know. That's really the $64,000 question. You recall in the first term when President Trump met with Vladimir Putin, he did not take his intelligence people into the meeting with him. Putin took his intelligence people into the meeting with him, because the president said he trusted the other side's intelligence people more than he trusted his own. And I get it. I get that he believes he was under direct threat from the deep state and the John Brennans of the world. I understand that. But I'm surprised that that feeling, that belief, has held over all this way into the second term — where you would believe Israeli information before you would believe your own people's information, especially when you know that the Israelis have a vested interest in you doing their dirty work for them.
General Dan Cain, the Joint Chiefs, and the decision to go to war
Tucker Carlson: What about General Dan Cain, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff? He would be informed on this — the Chairman has a pretty clear readout on what the intelligence is. We hear leaks into the political press in Washington that he argued against this war from the very beginning.
John Kiriakou: I'm glad you brought him up. We have some mutual friends, and not only have I never heard a single negative word ever about General Cain — I hear only the most superlative things, that he is the best Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the country could hope for right now. But we also hear these leaks that he argued against this war from the very beginning. It was my own experience — I don't believe that's true, and I hope that I'm right — that the Joint Chiefs were the last ones to go to war. They were the ones that always argued until the bitter end not to attack Iraq in 2003 because there was no exit strategy. I think that's the problem today. There's no exit strategy. It's easy to invade a country, it's easy to overthrow a government. It's very, very difficult to leave and to leave something that can actually function as a government.
Tucker Carlson: You want to hear an interesting coincidence? On 9/11, there were four planes. Two hit the World Trade Centers, one hits the Pentagon, the fourth — flight 93 — winds up crashing in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. We know that the vice president gave an order to shoot that plane down because he believed, understandably, it was headed into Washington. Four American fighter jets were scrambled from DC. The official story was they didn't get there in time and the plane was brought down instead by Todd Beamer and the other passengers. Of those four fighter jets, two of the pilots became generals. And one of them is Dan Cain.
John Kiriakou: I did not know that.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah, it's not widely known, but it's a fact. What are the odds of that?
John Kiriakou: Not good.
Tucker Carlson: I've never heard a bad word about General Cain, other than that he did not take a strong position on the Iran war before it started. I'd be very disappointed in that. I believe that's a fact. There's a lot of backfilling going on through leaking, but when it came down to it, General Cain did not say this is a bad idea. In fact, he said it's not my job to say things like that. Is it his job? If you're a senior briefer, if you're John Ratcliffe at CIA, or any of the people who advised the president on foreign policy questions and wars — if you think this is a terrible idea, should you say that?
John Kiriakou: At the CIA, that's an easy one to answer. The CIA is not supposed to be a policy organization. It's supposed to be a policy support organization. So the CIA director should never take a position on things like that. They do, obviously, but they're not supposed to. When George W. Bush was president in his second term, he changed the structure of the PDB — the President's Daily Brief. It used to be that for most articles, there would be a paragraph of fact and a paragraph of analysis. He ordered a third paragraph to be added: policy recommendation. And it was like setting the building on fire. Nobody wanted to be responsible for telling the president of the United States what he should do about a policy. That's just not what the CIA was created for.
Behind closed doors, of course, they're going to offer advice. When I was there, the Joint Chiefs almost always deferred to the secretary of defense, but they were also almost always of one mind. When we attacked Iraq in 2003, there was a very significant split where it was the Office of the Vice President, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the NSC that were the pro-war faction. And the anti-war faction — the political people, crazy as it sounds — was the CIA, the State Department, and the Joint Chiefs.
Tucker Carlson: I'm not surprised at all. I will never defend the CIA, but like Mossad, they're a stakeholder in the country. And sometimes the voices of restraint come from the people with the long-term interest in the state.
John Kiriakou: I think that's right. When the Israelis bombed Doha on September 9th — the day before Charlie Kirk was murdered — that was a lunatic thing to do, to bomb one of our closest allies in the world. And Mossad did not participate in that because they thought it was reckless.
Tucker Carlson: Mossad was a voice of restraint in Israel, which is hard to get your head around. Does that surprise you?
John Kiriakou: No, because you always have to consider the potential for blowback. Unintended consequences, responses that you haven't fully thought through. Blowback is a problem.
Tucker Carlson: So what kind of blowback is the United States looking at now that we've killed the religious leader of this country and his family?
John Kiriakou: We haven't had a problem with Shiite terrorism in the United States during my lifetime or ever. Are we going to have one now? I think not, only because it's always been so hard for Iranians or Iranian proxies to get visas to come to the United States. These rumors — I think they came from the FBI right after the conflict began — that there's a cell in Honolulu, there's a cell in Detroit. No, there aren't. If there were, you'd just grab them instead of just telling me about them. Why are you telling me about cells? Shouldn't you be arresting the cells if they're planning terror?
I remember when I was still with the CIA, driving down First Avenue in New York with two FBI agents. One of them said, you see that storefront? That's the headquarters of Hezbollah's cell in New York. And I said, well, why don't you do something about it? They're a terrorist group. And they just kept driving.
I think the attack on Iran has galvanized the Iranian public. The government was not a house of cards. We are not going to be seen as liberators. We're going to be seen as attackers and possibly occupiers. And I think that's the most immediate challenge we're going to face.
Tucker Carlson: That seems obvious now, seven weeks in. But at the time, my impression is the president really believed that if you kill the Ayatollah, the whole country collapses. But coming back to Hillary Clinton — the reason why it didn't is that it's not actually a theocracy, it's a military dictatorship.
John Kiriakou: It's actually one of the most liberal countries in the entire region. I think you and I are the only ones who know that, and we haven't even been to Iran. So many of my friends have been to Iran relatively recently, before the hostilities began. They posted videos on YouTube of just walking down the street in Tehran — the restaurants are open, the cafes, there's music, people laughing and having late dinners. It's just normal life.
Tucker Carlson: One of the most amazing pictures I think I've ever seen was a picture of a very butch-looking lesbian-type woman with a nose ring standing in Tehran, waving a photograph of the Ayatollah after he was killed. And the point is, this is exactly the person who opposed him while he was still alive. But now that we've killed him, you've got all the secular liberals of Tehran suddenly rallying around him.
John Kiriakou: We've forced them together. We really have. If I don't like whoever happens to be in the White House and I go to demonstrations and my fist is in the air, and then the Russians attack — I'm going to pick up a gun and I'm going to fight the Russians. No matter who attacks. Right, but human nature gets suspended for adversaries because they're not seen as human beings. They're totally irrational, it's a suicide cult, or whatever they're telling you on Fox News. And when the only analysis you're getting or paying attention to is from either the Israelis or the MEK — the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, which is really no more than a quasi-communist cult — then you can't rely on the information.
The MEK — from designated terror group to US-backed proxy
Tucker Carlson: Let's explain the MEK.
John Kiriakou: They were founded by a husband and wife team back in the sixties. In the seventies, they were based in Iraq, northeastern Iraq, and they would launch these cross-border attacks into Iran, deep into Iran — terrorist attacks in Tehran. They attempted to murder the American ambassador. They attempted to murder a three-star general who was the senior-most American military official in Iran. They've carried out anti-American terrorist attacks over the course of decades. And then they switched sides. When Saddam Hussein pushed them out of Iraq, they relocated mostly to Paris.
Maryam Rajavi's husband vanished, never to be seen again. The conventional wisdom is that she killed him or had him killed, and she took over the MEK. So in 2009, when Barack Obama is elected president and Hillary Clinton becomes secretary of state, the MEK hires some of the most high-powered lobbyists in Washington to get them off the terrorism list. And they engaged with both Democrats and Republicans — everybody from Howard Dean to Rudy Giuliani.
Tucker Carlson: Howard Dean was lobbying for MEK?
John Kiriakou: Oh yeah, and Rudy Giuliani. You should see the pictures of them together — it's sickening — at these big banquets in Washington to raise money for the MEK. But these are the people who tried to kill the US ambassador.
Tucker Carlson: But they're the good guys now. And I'm sure they did it by saying, we're the enemy of Israel's enemy, therefore we're your friend.
John Kiriakou: That's exactly what the argument is. And so they got themselves off the terrorism list. They pay millions of dollars to DC lobbyists, senior political figures, former political figures. And now they can accept American weapons. The MEK doesn't have the wherewithal to fight the Iranian government. It's just all about arming themselves.
Tucker Carlson: What do they believe?
John Kiriakou: They're ardently communist.
Tucker Carlson: And we're supporting them? And Howard Dean and Rudy Giuliani were lobbying for them?
John Kiriakou: Remember, the Iranian regime is this theocratic terrorist cabal, and we have to overthrow them to make the Middle East safe. It's insane. I know very little about MEK other than what you've said, but I do know that they're feared. And it's suspected — because I've heard this from intel people — that they're used basically as assassins for hire.
The conventional wisdom is that the Israelis use the MEK regularly to carry out these assassinations we've seen over the years in Tehran. And I have heard — I don't know if it's true — in the United States as well. The MEK is getting money from Israel. Lots of money. And I think most people who pay attention think the MEK is a reasonable, pro-America group. From the very beginning, when they were rehabilitated in 2009, I just started shaking my head. The MEK had the money to hire all these multimillion-dollar lobbyists, and they were smart in that they did it across the political spectrum — Democrats and Republicans — from rich Iranian exiles who were willing to hold their nose over the personal ideology of the organization and just say, well, if you're going to kill ayatollahs, then okay, I'll write you a check. And the Israelis, of course, see them as useful.
Reza Pahlavi and the manufactured opposition
Tucker Carlson: What about the Shah's son, who we've also been trained to think of as a good guy?
John Kiriakou: Reza Pahlavi is most definitely not a good guy. He's the son of the Shah who was deposed famously in 1979. When his father was deposed, he was only 18 or 19 years old. He came to the United States with his family. The Shah got sick almost as soon as he came to the United States — he developed cancer. He was treated, I think it was in Houston. The Iranian government under the Ayatollahs objected so vociferously that they raided the American embassy and took our diplomats hostage, held them for 444 days. We told the Shah to go get cancer treatment somewhere else. He went to the Bahamas for a while, then to Panama, and then ended up finally settling in Cairo, where he died.
His family stayed here in the United States — Reza Pahlavi in Northern Virginia, the mother in North Carolina, and Reza's younger brother in Boston. Reza Pahlavi is not equipped to lead anything. He is a playboy. He had an affair with his brother's wife. His brother turned to drugs and committed suicide. His own wife, Reza Pahlavi's wife, is having a very public affair right now with her personal trainer. The Parisian press is just crazy over it — they publish pictures of the two of them together all the time. It's humiliating in anybody's culture, let alone in Iranian culture, which is supposed to be very pious and very Muslim.
On top of that, he has said repeatedly — most recently on the Patrick Bet-David podcast — that now he doesn't think he wants to go back to Iran. He's made a life here. He's very wealthy. His kids are Americans. There's really no reason to go back to Iran.
Tucker Carlson: So why are we talking about him? He was all over Mar-a-Lago and the White House.
John Kiriakou: And then, well, maybe I'm not the guy, I'm kind of afraid. So what has he done for the last 47 years? Nothing. You see him every once in a while at cultural events. You see him once or twice a year at Iranian cultural performances in Washington. But he's just not a player. Even in Iranian exile circles, he's just not a player.
Tucker Carlson: So why were we talking about him nonstop all summer?
John Kiriakou: Because the Israelis like him very much. Remember, his father opened diplomatic relations with Israel. There was an Israeli embassy in Tehran and an Iranian embassy in Jerusalem. And I think there are a lot of people who pine for those days and think that, well, in a perfect world, if Reza Pahlavi were Reza Shah, then Israel and Iran would be friends and all the Iranian people would fall into line and we could all live happily ever after.
Tucker Carlson: But is there any indication that the people of Iran want to exchange a theocracy for a monarchy?
John Kiriakou: Not a chance. The only place where he has solid support is in the Iranian-American community in Southern California. The only zip code in LA to go for Trump.
Tucker Carlson: This is yet another example of an exile community leveraging the power of the US economy and military for its own parochial ends. But no one can say that.
John Kiriakou: No, you can't say that. There's political fallout. The Shah's son thing was totally fake from the very beginning. Totally manufactured. Didn't we do this in Afghanistan? Some guy ran a restaurant in Baltimore and was going to be like the king of Afghanistan.
Tucker Carlson: I met Karzai's brother. He still has the restaurant in Baltimore. It's quite good. But where does this come from? In the face of a hundred years of failing to pull off these schemes, why does no one pause and say, we can't just install someone to run a foreign country? We don't even speak the language. We know nothing about it.
John Kiriakou: Because we don't understand history. And not just at the CIA — John Kerry made the same mistakes. We always think we're the smartest people in the room, that we know better than everybody else. On what basis? Arrogance. It's just arrogance. And we're not the smartest people in the room and we don't know history.
The night before the Iraq War — and the plan to go to Tehran
John Kiriakou: I've told this story a million times. The night before we attacked Iraq, we had the final Principals Committee meeting. The Principals Committee is normally chaired by the president. It includes the vice president, the secretaries of state and defense, the national security advisor, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the vice chairman, and in this case the head of CENTCOM, and then a bunch of senior-level NSC people. And everybody brings a note taker. I was George Tenet's note taker — he was the director of the CIA at the time. For whatever reason, the president didn't attend this meeting. There was something else going on. So the vice president chaired the meeting.
Tucker Carlson: The president didn't attend the final Principals meeting before the Iraq War?
John Kiriakou: Right. But Dick Cheney did. To make a long story short, General Tommy Franks, who was the commander of Central Command at the time, gave his briefing. We know our men are here and there, elements of this group and that group, the third corps and the first corps. And then he says, if all goes well, we're going to invade Iraq the next morning. And if all goes well, we can be in Tehran by August. And George Tenet discreetly turns off his microphone and turns to me — I'm sitting behind his right shoulder — and he says, did he say Tehran or did he say Baghdad? And I said, he said Tehran. And George says, have these people lost their minds?
I got back to the office at the end of the meeting and the deputy director said to me, how'd the Principals Committee meeting go? And I said, did you know we were going to attack Iran? And he said, are they still talking about that? We're not going to attack Iran. That's just a pipe dream that these people at the White House have. And I said, do they know nothing about history? And he said, no, they know nothing about history.
As we were walking out of that meeting, one of the NSC people — a guy who I disrespected the most of all my colleagues at the NSC — said giddily, as we were standing up to walk out of the meeting, he said, when we cross that border tomorrow, they're going to throw flowers at us. And I thought, buddy, have you never read a history book? They're not going to see us as liberators. They're going to see us as invaders and occupiers.
So many of my contemporaries thought, well, we're going to move into southern Iraq — that's the Shia part — and they've been so brutalized by Saddam Hussein, they're going to greet us as liberators. We're going to arm them and go together to Baghdad and liberate Baghdad. No. First of all, we scared the hell out of them when we crossed the border. There was this very tense standoff where we moved into Najaf, which is one of the holiest sites in all of Shia Islam. There was a huge group of people and several ran inside one of the mosques to take refuge. And we're like, no, no, we don't mean you any harm. We came to liberate you. And they were like, get out of our city.
Finally what the military guys did is they set down their weapons and asked to see the tribal leaders. They met with the tribal leaders inside the mosque and said, we came here to liberate you. And the tribal leader said, we don't want your liberation. If you're here to fight Saddam, go fight Saddam — leave us out of it. And so that's why we didn't have support in the South. Why should we expect anything different in Iran?
Tucker Carlson: An invading army inevitably mistreats civilians. I saw it in Iraq. I don't think they mean it. Most American soldiers are nice guys, but there's just no way around it because they're under threat or the perception of threat. And so they have to get rough. They have to stick rifles in people's faces all the time. And then it's just a slippery slope from there. Even if they don't shoot anybody, it just engenders hatred and resentment. I remember seeing this at a gas station in Nasiriyah where they humiliate a man in front of his son. And I don't think there was an option — everyone's afraid of getting killed. But downstream from that, where's that son now, 23 years later? How anti-American is he now?
John Kiriakou: By definition, it's counterproductive.
Tucker Carlson: So just to your point about the president believing that Iran was a house of cards that just needed one swift push to collapse — where did he get that idea?
John Kiriakou: He could only have gotten that idea from Benjamin Netanyahu. That's it. Because the CIA analysis has been consistent over the course of decades. We can't just fire a couple of rockets and take down a government in a country of 93 million people. That's just not the way real life works. They're going to rally around their leadership because we're outsiders.
Tucker Carlson: Of all the countries in that part of the world, Iran is the most durable. It's a real country with a proud history stretching back millennia.
John Kiriakou: I have a lot of Iranian-American friends, some quite close, and they never stop talking about the history — to the point where I have to say, please, can we please talk about something other than Cyrus the Great and Xerxes? I need a break. But that's how proud they are of their history. You don't see that with, say, Kuwaitis.
Tucker Carlson: Iran, of all the countries, maybe in the world, would be high on the list of ones that's pretty hard to beat. It's the size of Western Europe, 93 million people, with a forbidding topography on top of it. Not easy.
The path to diplomacy — and the end of American hegemony
Tucker Carlson: We go in on February 28th and Iran does not, strictly speaking, control the strait at the outlet of the Persian Gulf. There's unimpeded shipping. The six Gulf states are thriving. Iraq is pretty peaceful, for Iraq. Things are fine. Now they're not fine at all. How are they restored to fine?
John Kiriakou: Only through diplomacy. That's it. Whether we like it or not — especially whether the Israelis like it or not — we are going to have to sit across the table from these people and come up with an agreement. It's going to be an agreement that we are not going to be 100% happy with, but that's what diplomacy is all about.
Tucker Carlson: Not happy with — you mean Iran will be more powerful at the end of this than they were at the outset?
John Kiriakou: I think that's an inevitability. We have forced the Iranians into the embrace of the Chinese and the Russians and the Indians. And we're going to get to the point where we're just not going to be able to stand up against that kind of an alliance and make meaningful gains.
Think about this. Iran is a BRICS country. Brazil, Russia, India, China, plus South Africa and Argentina and Iran and a couple of others. Eventually, using the European Union as their model, they're going to come up with a unified currency. It's probably 20 or 30 years down the road, but it's going to happen one of these days. That will be the end of American hegemony in the region, because as things stand now, almost all oil transactions in the world are done in dollars — the famous petrodollar. Well, a year ago, Kuwait sold a shipment of oil to China for yuan. And the Indians, just about a week ago, paid for a shipment of oil in yuan. So we're already seeing the cracks in the dam. And then just blasting the place is only going to make this inevitability come sooner. I think it weakens us.
Tucker Carlson: I think it's definitely the end of something profound. What are our military options at this point?
John Kiriakou: I'm not sure that there are any viable military options. God forbid we should target the civilian infrastructure — that's a war crime. It's very clear in international law. You can bomb the electrical grid or the water treatment plants. We do, but it's a war crime. So what are we going to do? Just keep blasting the IRGC? Where has that gotten us? They're survivors. It hasn't led to the collapse of the government. So when are we going to finally come to the conclusion that what we're doing is simply not working? Maybe we can wrest some concessions from the Iranians across the negotiating table. Maybe we could figure out how to use their closeness with the Chinese and the Russians to our benefit. But we're going to have to let the diplomats do what diplomats are paid to do.
Tucker Carlson: I don't think we have any left. All of these negotiations have been run by non-diplomats.
John Kiriakou: I'm glad you brought that up. We have almost no US ambassadors in the six GCC countries — Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates. Most of them were relieved of their duties a year ago and have never been replaced. So there is no Philip Habib to go from country to country right now as there was in the 1980s.
Tucker Carlson: Why do we have no ambassadors in our most important allies?
John Kiriakou: I think the president concluded that these ambassadors were not fully bought into his foreign policy and he withdrew them short of tour. They were all professional diplomats, career diplomats, not political appointees. And the department just never named new ambassadors.
Tucker Carlson: It almost seems like this is an intentional effort to destroy the United States by our own government.
John Kiriakou: It feels that way, doesn't it.
The Charlie Kirk assassination, the Butler attempt, and the shutdown of leads
Tucker Carlson: Two or three weeks after this war began, the head of the National Counterterrorism Center, Joe Kent, resigned. In an interview with me shortly after, he said he believed the Butler assassination attempt, the other assassination attempt in Florida, a couple of breaches of Donald Trump's personal security, and Charlie Kirk's murder may all have played a role in convincing the president to go to war with Iran. What do you think that means?
John Kiriakou: I would not be at all surprised. Let me preface this by saying I don't have any inside information. But I would not be surprised if a person or multiple people got into the president's ear and said, this isn't a coincidence that there were these three events — there were three events because the Iranians are behind it. They've got these cells around the United States. We can't identify them, we can't catch them, but they're gunning for you. And Charlie Kirk was a practice hit, or Charlie Kirk was a message, or whatever. And I wouldn't be surprised if the president would believe something like that, if people he trusts are telling him there's a problem and the problem originates in Iran — whether it's true or not — that he would respond to that.
Tucker Carlson: A lot of people did tell him that. That's a fact. I can confirm it. People told him Iran is out to kill you, the Butler assassination attempt — Iran was behind it. People were saying that. But where that theory falls down is with the Charlie Kirk assassination. If you were trying to claim that the Iranians were behind it, and there were leads from the National Counterterrorism Center or the ODNI that suggested foreign involvement, you would follow up on those leads. But they shut them down. Yes. And that's a fact. And it doesn't make you a reckless conspiracy theorist to ask — why wouldn't you follow up on those leads?
John Kiriakou: I'm one of these people that believes that in almost all cases, the simplest explanation is probably the correct one. But when word came out, thanks to Joe Kent and his brave actions and revelations, that he was not permitted to follow up on these leads — call me a conspiracy theorist, but that's the only place I can go.
Tucker Carlson: What's the other answer? I mean, I want to find another answer. Charlie was a good friend of mine. But even if he wasn't, I just live in this country. Are there any good answers to that question?
John Kiriakou: No, there's literally no reason why you wouldn't follow up on a lead.
Tucker Carlson: Why would the president shut down the investigation into Butler and into his own attempted assassination? I can't even fathom a reason, especially because this president has taken such a strong stand against the deep state. If we all agree that there's a deep state — or call it permanent Washington, the people who are going to be here when you leave — you would think the president would be the first person to want to run these allegations to ground. Of course, but also just out of self-preservation. Why would the president keep the leadership of the Secret Service in place after his own personal security was breached repeatedly?
John Kiriakou: I worked with a guy in Athens. He was a contractor. He had been a long-time Secret Service agent and was the creator, the founder of the Secret Service's intelligence division. He started under Eisenhower. He was in Dallas with Kennedy. And finally he was successful in creating this intelligence division to work with the CIA and the FBI to head off threats to the president. He starts getting these letters at the White House from Sarah Jane Moore of San Francisco, California, saying things like, ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee. He flies out to San Francisco and knocks on her apartment door. She answers. He says, Sarah Jane, you keep threatening the president in these letters. What's going on with this? And she said, no, I didn't mean it. My social security check was late and I got mad, so I wrote to the president and I threatened him, but I didn't really mean to threaten him. He said, you're not going to try to kill a president, are you? And she said no. And two weeks later, the president goes to San Francisco and she's there — bang, bang, bang, bang, bang — trying to kill the president. Heads rolled. His being the first — he was fired from the Secret Service, and then they cleaned out the entire leadership of the Secret Service. That's what normal people do.
So here we've got two legitimate attempts to murder the president of the United States, and it's the same people — the same people who let the bad guys get close enough to him to take a shot and hit him in the ear.
Tucker Carlson: Given that we both have conceded we don't know the answer to this question — tell me, as someone who spent a lot of his life abroad working for the US government, assessing the workings of other governments and drawing rational conclusions. Let's say the facts as we've agreed are real — applied to, say, Bahrain, where you lived for years. If the head of state of Bahrain had a couple of documented assassination attempts against him and didn't investigate them, what would you conclude?
John Kiriakou: That he's weak. That he is weak, and either he's afraid of what he's going to stir up, or he's just such a weak leader that it hasn't occurred to him to follow through on this.
Tucker Carlson: But it's an attempt on his life. He got shot in the ear. I don't think a single American would have been surprised or unsupportive if he had come down with an iron fist. Everybody in Butler that day in the Secret Service, and everybody in the Secret Service leadership, should have had their badges confiscated and been walked to the door. You're fired and you're not working in government again. You allowed an assassin — a child — to get onto the roof of a building, and someone on a walkie-talkie is saying, there's a guy on the roof over there with a high-powered rifle and he's pointing it at the president. What should I do? Do I have authorization to shoot? What is that? Everybody should have lost his or her job. And instead, literally nobody lost their job.
John Kiriakou: So that's so weird because normally there's a one-to-one between someone's obvious interest and his actions. That's a threat to me — I'm not putting up with it. But here you have a case where it's a clear threat to him, but he's absolutely putting up with it. You're ascribing that to weakness. I just can't imagine, and I don't think he's a weak man. I think he has proven time and time again that he's not. So then, what are we looking at?
Tucker Carlson: We're missing something here. There's something deeper in the system that's not permitting him to go forward, or that's not permitting the government to conduct an appropriate investigation. What are historians going to say about this 20, 30, 50 years from now?
John Kiriakou: They're going to say at very least there's a mystery at the center of it, at the center of global events. And now that we've embarked on this war against the counsel of the entire US government — as you just said, there's no one in the US government who was for this that we know of — and he does it anyway, in the wake of those acts of violence. Joe Kent says there's the connection.
I have a friendly acquaintance who spent 30-plus years at MI6, the British foreign intelligence service. I spoke with him recently and he said, you know, you Americans — you're a mystery to us now. We thought we knew you until 9/11, and then you went out and just started killing everybody. And we thought, well, the Americans were traumatized, this is going to run its course. And then it seemed to run its course. And then you invade Iran and you don't consult with us, you don't ask for our help. And then you blame us when things start turning against you. Like, why aren't the British helping us? Well, you haven't asked for any help and you didn't tell us what you were going to do in advance. And he said, what are we supposed to think? The only conclusion we can draw is that you're not really the great friends that we thought you were.
Israel's priorities, American sovereignty, and the AIPAC question
Tucker Carlson: My read on it, having watched us all pretty carefully over a long time, is that we have just taken Israeli priorities and made them our own. And Israeli priorities would include destabilizing Iran, turning it into a chaotic mass, and destroying Europe. The Israelis hate Europe. And the Israelis thrive on chaos. Chaos in Iraq was good for Israel. Chaos in Iran is good for Israel. Chaos in Libya, in Syria is good for Israel. It's not good for us, but it's good for them. When you were serving in government, who were the allies we were closest to?
John Kiriakou: We were joined at the hip with the Brits. We were very close to the Israelis, but we tried to keep the Israelis at arm's length. They would constantly make demands that we would deny, but we were still close. But we were really closest to the Brits, to the Australians, to a very slightly lesser extent the New Zealanders and the Canadians. The English-speaking countries, without a doubt.
Tucker Carlson: And that's not true anymore.
John Kiriakou: Not really. The Canadians and the United States have an actively hostile relationship. I mean, we still sit together and share information on stuff, but we genuinely don't like each other.
Tucker Carlson: If you were running the United States for its own benefit, of course you would be closest to the countries that share the language, the culture, the religion, and certainly the border — the longest border is Canada. But all of those countries are hated by Israel for reasons that are ancient and hard to understand. And now we hate all those countries. So it does seem like we've assumed Israel's priorities.
John Kiriakou: It really does. Tucker, when I was serving in Bahrain from 1994 to 96, I was the economic officer. I would go over to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to see the director of economic affairs every three or four weeks. I would save up a bunch of demarches — white papers — and just go over and say, your excellency, the United States of America officially requests your government's vote in the elections for the International Telecommunications Organization next month. And he'd say, done. And I'd go back and write cables back to State.
One of them was: your excellency, we're involved in a dispute with the government of Canada. We believe that clams are fish, and the Canadians classify clams as shellfish. But the definition of a shellfish is that it can't move more than — I think it was — ten feet a day, and clams move like twelve feet a day. So we're in this dispute, it's going to the United Nations, we would like Bahrain's support. And then I'd go out with a Canadian diplomat and I'd say, what are we going to do about this shellfish situation? And we would laugh and have lunch and have a beer and go back to our embassies. Now we disagree on basic fundamentals of foreign policy. We have in some cases an actively hostile relationship with the Canadians, sometimes with the Brits, to the point where it's impacting the relationship.
This MI6 officer I mentioned a moment ago — he said, we still love you, we just don't like you very much. And I think that's really what it comes down to.
Tucker Carlson: What does it mean for US national security and economic interest going forward if Canada becomes a country run by the Chinese, which is what it's becoming? That's a real thing. And I think it's going to pose a challenge that we are willfully unprepared for. I just want to be clear — I'm not blaming the Israelis for any of this. It's US government officials who decided to sell out their country. I don't know exactly why. But how do you disengage? How do you get American sovereignty back? How do you break the stranglehold of the Israeli lobby on the US government?
John Kiriakou: Just like you do, I know that it wasn't always like this. AIPAC — the American Israel Public Affairs Committee — only became a major player in American politics beginning around 1970, when President Nixon formally changed US policy toward Israel to guarantee the safety and security of Israel. That changed things. What he should have done at the same time was to force AIPAC to register as a foreign agent. It clearly represents the foreign policy of Israel.
Tucker Carlson: John F. Kennedy tried to do that.
John Kiriakou: John F. Kennedy did try to do it. And I think President Johnson was afraid to take them on and he never did anything.
Tucker Carlson: Well, he was working with them. Look at the USS Liberty. The Israelis take the blame for that — they're the ones who committed the murders — but I don't think Lyndon Johnson gets the credit he deserves for punishing the surviving crew of that ship for talking about it.
John Kiriakou: I went back to the original press reporting. I wanted to do an episode of my own podcast on the Liberty, just because so many people still talk about it. We're talking about 1967. So I went back to the original reporting and the press releases coming out of the State Department and the Defense Department were blistering. And then the president said, what are you doing? Stop criticizing Israel.
Tucker Carlson: What do you think that was?
John Kiriakou: That was the Israel lobby. But why would Lyndon Johnson have been such a slave to it? I think he was afraid. There has been credible reporting over the years that the Israelis may have had something to do with the Kennedy assassination — may have had advanced warning about the Kennedy assassination — and that they either participated in it, allowed it to happen, or didn't warn the United States that it was going to happen, because Kennedy not just refused to give them nuclear technology, he actively stood in the way of them acquiring nuclear technology to create a bomb. Ben-Gurion resigned over it. He was demanding inspections of the Dimona facility, the nuclear facility in Israel.
Tucker Carlson: I don't know the answer. I can promise you everyone around the world thinks that's true. But it's just interesting that Lyndon Johnson was such a slave that he attacked Americans for talking about the murder of Americans by a foreign power. And the Israelis clearly knew that it was an American ship. It was flying the American flag and it said USS Liberty on the side of it. And then they waited something like 45 minutes after attacking it and then came back and attacked it again. So there's no question they tried to sink it. And they said, oh no, we thought it was from the Egyptian Navy.
John Kiriakou: Come on, you can come up with something better than that.
Tucker Carlson: So how do you disentangle at this point? My impression is that the Israeli government is like embedded within the US government at this point.
John Kiriakou: It seems that way to me, yes. I think AIPAC really does have to register as a foreign agent. It really does. Listen, if I had to register as a foreign agent because the Abu Dhabi Chamber of Commerce hired me to write op-eds and I had to go to FARA.gov and register, then AIPAC should be registered.
Tucker Carlson: If the United States were ever to take a more arm's-length posture toward Israel, what do you think the consequences would be?
John Kiriakou: I honestly don't think there would be any consequences. Israel is an important and valuable ally. So are a lot of other countries. And I just don't think the Israelis should be treated any differently than the Brits or the French or the Greeks or anybody else. Why do they get special treatment? I just don't understand. We've sacrificed all of our other relationships on their behalf.
Tucker Carlson: Their priorities become our priorities and all of a sudden they're our only friend. And you can't tell me that's accidental.
John Kiriakou: They have a much longer-term view of these things than we do. They began to try to implement this policy in the sixties, and it finally came to fruition. It's prime minister after prime minister cultivating not just American political figures, but wealthy American Jews and saying, look, we've got a lot of lobbying to do, we've got a lot of PR to do, we're going to need money to do this. And money's never been a problem.
The prospect of a draft, the midterms, and congressional weakness
Tucker Carlson: Back to the war — if there's a diplomatic resolution, which common sense would suggest because the global economy hangs on this question, getting it fixed leaves Iran in a stronger position than at the outset of the war.
John Kiriakou: Without any question.
Tucker Carlson: Can Israel live with that?
John Kiriakou: I think Israel is going to have to live with it. Because the American people do not support a long-term conflict in Iran. The American people don't support boots on the ground. This is one of those areas where the left and the right come together. They can agree on this, and they will not support boots on the ground.
Tucker Carlson: Does that matter? I'm hearing calls for a draft.
John Kiriakou: I've heard the same. A draft is the most totalitarian thing you can do — forcing people to go die for something they don't agree with. Can you imagine the electoral bloodbath that would take place if Congress voted in favor of a draft?
Tucker Carlson: This behavior suggests they don't care about what an election produces. Trump doesn't seem to care about the midterms. Why is that? If you're calling for a land invasion of Iran, a draft to back it up, the public hates this — there's no polling that suggests otherwise. Elections are this fall. The party doing this is clearly going to be punished, and they don't seem to care. What does this all add up to?
John Kiriakou: I don't think he has the votes to pull off a draft, at least not in the Senate where he would need 60 votes to break cloture. I think it's a non-starter. There are enough members who would oppose it.
Tucker Carlson: He started a war with Iran without Congress.
John Kiriakou: But a draft is something different. That would require very definitive congressional action. There are so many congressional weaklings when it comes to issues of war and peace. Look at Lindsey Graham. I get so frustrated even just listening to the man speak. Lindsey Graham has been all over the map ideologically. I think he's concluded that neoconservatism is ascendant, and so he's jumped back in. He apparently has the president's ear and he's the Trump whisperer telling the president attack, attack, attack. But extending that to a draft just does not have the same kind of support. It's one thing for Lindsey Graham to say the president should be free to bomb our enemies and to send troops and naval strike forces. I strongly disagree — I think what you're saying is illegal — but I get that this is a matter for debate. Reinstating the draft clearly and obviously can only be done by congressional action, and the votes are not there.
Reforming the CIA — and the question of political control
Tucker Carlson: I know that the president has real concerns about the intelligence community. And one of the reasons he was willing to take Mossad's view is because he doesn't trust his own intel agencies. How do you reform the CIA?
John Kiriakou: You're going to have to tear the place down to the studs and enact real controls. When I first joined the CIA, I had literally no idea of the political views of the people I was working with. In 1996, a woman that I sat next to got in trouble for discreetly taping up a Bob Dole for President bumper sticker in her own cubicle. She was called to HR, she was reprimanded, had a memo put in her file, and she wasn't eligible for promotion for a year because she had violated the cardinal rule that we do not take political positions. And I remember thinking, wow.
And then we got to the point where the CIA is so politicized that you end up with 51 senior intelligence service officers lying in writing that the Hunter Biden laptop bore all the hallmarks of a Russian intelligence information operation. How did we get there?
I'll give you another example. In 1992, we had a morning meeting like we did every morning. My boss said at the end of that morning meeting, I know we're not supposed to do this, but I'm just really curious who you guys voted for this morning. It was three for Bush, three for Clinton, and two for Perot. And I remember thinking, wow, that's interesting. But I would never have known otherwise. Well, now it's like everybody was in bed with Obama, everybody was in bed with Biden. How did that happen? How did we get there so quickly when you know what the rules are? The rules are very clear: no politics. It's all about keeping the country safe, until it's not.
To reform the place, you have to tear it down and then rebuild it with real rules that are really followed — you just cannot be political. And then maybe you put the brakes on political involvement for 12 or 18 months after you leave, just like there are brakes on lobbying. You can't just leave your job on Friday afternoon and begin lobbying your former colleagues on Monday morning.
Tucker Carlson: One way would be to make it more political. The CIA has the fewest political appointees of any agency — there are three or four, something like that. There's almost no civilian control at this point.
John Kiriakou: The intelligence committees in the House and Senate are supposed to provide oversight, but they're just cheerleaders. They pick the weakest, most compromised people to sit on those committees. The intelligence committees are select committees, not standing committees. And so it's leadership that appoints all of the members. The whole thing is fixed from the beginning. Of course. And as I go down the roster of the members of those committees, I'm like, oh, they're the most screwed up people in the entire Congress.
Tucker Carlson: Why wouldn't you return some measure of public control to the CIA?
John Kiriakou: I hadn't thought of it that way, but that's actually a good idea. If you have a senior intelligence service that's embedded — not going anywhere, they're there for 30 or 35 years, and they're going to be anti-president or anti-Republican — then maybe you do need political appointees to keep the honest people out. The public ought to have some control over what its government is doing.
I spoke with a senator a couple of days ago. He has entered into something of a dispute with the intelligence committee and they just won't budge. What he's asking for is legitimately under his purview as the chairman of another committee having to do with security, foreign policy, intelligence. And the CIA won't budge, the intelligence committee won't budge. He said, I don't know what to do. And I said, well, you've got to approach leadership. He said, that was the first place I went. And leadership said they don't want to get involved in the dispute between two chairmen. So what do you do when everybody on the intelligence committee is there just to serve the CIA, not to oversee it, not to ensure that it follows the law — just to cheerlead for it?
Tucker Carlson: They spied on members of Congress and were never punished for it.
John Kiriakou: Never. I remember Eric Holder saying, now now, I got these referrals, these criminal referrals, everybody needs to calm down, nobody's going to be investigated. What do you mean nobody's going to be investigated? The CIA broke into the computer system of the Senate Intelligence Committee to steal the information that was being developed there about the torture program. You're spying on members of Congress. What do you mean there's nothing to see here, move along? It was a crime, but never prosecuted.
Tucker Carlson: Do you have any hope that the government will return to its original purpose, which is serving the population of the country?
John Kiriakou: I've consistently been criticized as being too optimistic in life about everything. I'm always glass half full. But I can't see any reason at all to be optimistic. Really. There are no more Frank Churches or Barry Goldwaters — real leaders. Even Tip O'Neill recognized that Congress was a co-equal participant in government, which drove Jimmy Carter nuts, but allowed him to negotiate successfully with Ronald Reagan. Why can't we have that? That worked. Why can't we go back to that? I don't know. Maybe because as governments degrade, all of the power vests in the executive. I think that's what we're seeing. And the framers understood that.
And then you have Lindsey Graham saying we need a weaker Congress. That's essentially what he's saying about the War Powers Act.
Tucker Carlson: What is that exactly? Why do the intel agencies and the government of Israel seem to have so much control over Lindsey Graham? Ted Cruz is the same way. And it's both people with weird personal lives. Is that connected?
John Kiriakou: I think there's probably something to that. Alan Dershowitz once said that the most intelligent student he ever had was Ted Cruz. I don't get that. I want my elected officials to be smarter than I am. I want them to think outside the box. I want to believe in them.
Tucker Carlson: I can say as someone who knows Ted really, really well, that genius is not a word that's ever come to mind. Glib, but glibness is not IQ. Not a wise man at all. Not a well-informed man.
John Kiriakou: There are no Birch Bayhs or Frank Churches or Bob Doles or Barry Goldwaters or Ted Kennedys — these thinkers that gave us the government we had in the 60s, the 70s, and the 80s. They're just gone.
Tucker Carlson: All victims of affluence and just flaccid thinking, which was a result of flaccid living. It was nice to worry about nuclear annihilation every day because it makes you sharper. The governments around the world that we respect, that we think are impressive and smart — they're all countries that can't take anything for granted, that are constantly fighting for their own survival, having to calculate everything from eight different angles. Those are the most impressive people. And the people who think the affluence will never end — it doesn't work out.
John Kiriakou's pardon application
Tucker Carlson: Are you getting a pardon? You were targeted by the US government on insane grounds because you told the truth. The only people who are ever punished in the US government are those who tell the truth. No one's ever penalized for lying. And you were forced to plead and you're a convicted felon — and not someone who should be. So you're trying to get a pardon.
John Kiriakou: I'm trying to get a pardon. I think I have reached the president. I have absolutely wonderful support, thanks to you. You've supported me from the very, very beginning.
Tucker Carlson: It's not even about you personally. You shouldn't send people to prison for telling the truth. And if you do, you're not the good guy.
John Kiriakou: I agree with you. I have far more support among Republicans than I have among Democrats. Far more support. MAGA Republicans — on the surface of things, it's because the Obama administration went after me. But it's more than that. Deeper down, I think that MAGA Republicans really do believe in the rule of law and in the Constitution. And really, at the end of the day, this comes down to the Constitution. When I put my hand in the air on my very first day at the CIA and I promised to protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, domestic and foreign — I meant it. And I hate to think that I was the only person in the room that day who did. And I think for the most part, it's Republicans who respect that.
I've spoken with very high-level, well-placed people close to the president, both in and out of government. I know that the president knows that I've applied for the pardon. I will admit to you that I disagree with the president's policy on Iran, but I don't think that's a big deal. People disagree. To me, that's the normal part of life. Maybe you and I don't agree on everything — we're still friends. So I'm hoping that he does the right thing.
Tucker Carlson: I would hate to say that your mild and measured criticism of the state of Israel would in any way affect your eligibility for a pardon. Because it's one thing to go to war because you're pushed by a foreign country, but to decide how you treat your own citizens based on their views of a foreign country — that is treason. I just hope that plays no role.
John Kiriakou: Thank you. I appreciate that. Either way, I'm optimistic.
Tucker Carlson: John Kiriakou, thank you so much.
John Kiriakou: Thanks so much. Good to see you.