Former CIA officer John Kiriakou says the agency produced three separate national intelligence estimates before the Iran war began, and each one found that Tehran had no nuclear weapons program. He made the claim on the Nov. 6 “Intelligence Community Roundtable” edition of Judge Andrew Napolitano’s Judging Freedom, alongside Larry Johnson.
Napolitano asked what the CIA had told the president “about the practical consequences of his plan with Netanyahu to win the war in six days.” Kiriakou answered that “we know a little bit from leaks,” then said: “the CIA had published three separate national intelligence estimates and all three times concluded that the Iranians did not have a nuclear weapons program. It just simply didn’t exist.”
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told Congress in March 2025 that the intelligence community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon,” and Trump answered that he didn’t “care what she said.”
Kiriakou said the agency’s analysts were just as consistent on what a war would cost. “The CIA was pretty consistent that this was a bad idea from the very beginning,” he said, arguing that the analysis held “the Iranians were far tougher than we as policymakers believed.” In his telling, a look at the map was enough: Iran is “the size as the whole of Western Europe,” ringed by mountains on three sides, with “92 million people, all of whom will go to their deaths to protect their homeland.” Conquering it, he said, would have taken “one million ground troops.”
He also pointed to a leak from “less than three weeks ago.” A CIA “red cell” team, the kind of group meant to “think outside the box,” had concluded that “it was Israel that could break up and fall apart and cease to exist because of all of this, not Iran,” Kiriakou said. The person who leaked it, he said, was a CIA contractor who passed it to his girlfriend, who put it in her blog. That matches the case of Ian Brinksman, the contractor the FBI arrested last month, as we reported. His case is ongoing, and Kiriakou’s account of what the red cell concluded rests on the leaked reporting, not on a document we have seen.
The segment was part of a broader hour in which Johnson and Kiriakou argued that Trump’s Iran policy cost Republicans in Tuesday’s midterms. Both are known critics of the war, and the claims above are theirs.
