{"id":332874,"date":"2026-11-09T08:15:00","date_gmt":"2026-11-09T08:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=332874"},"modified":"2026-11-09T08:40:23","modified_gmt":"2026-11-09T08:40:23","slug":"ex-cia-officer-says-the-agency-delivered-the-same-iran-verdict-three-times-before-the-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=332874","title":{"rendered":"Ex-CIA Officer Says The Agency Delivered The Same Iran Verdict Three Times Before The War"},"content":{"rendered":"<h1 style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Tyler Durden \u2013 Zero Hdge Nov 7, 2026<\/strong><\/h1>\n<p>Former CIA officer John Kiriakou says <strong>the agency produced three separate national intelligence estimates before the Iran war began, and each one found that Tehran had no nuclear weapons program.<\/strong> He made the claim on the Nov. 6 &#8220;Intelligence Community Roundtable&#8221; edition of Judge Andrew Napolitano&#8217;s Judging Freedom, alongside Larry Johnson.<\/p>\n<p>Napolitano asked what the CIA had told the president &#8220;about the practical consequences of his plan with Netanyahu to win the war in six days.&#8221; Kiriakou answered that &#8220;<strong>we know a little bit from leaks<\/strong>,&#8221; then said: &#8220;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&#8217;t exist.&#8221;<\/p>\n<div align=\"center\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/OYtxQv9lch8?si=Gu2cEv0NkVTWtY39\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/newshour\/politics\/americas-spies-say-iran-wasnt-building-a-nuclear-weapon-trump-dismisses-that-assessment\">told Congress<\/a> in March 2025 that the intelligence community &#8220;continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon,&#8221; and Trump answered that he didn&#8217;t &#8220;care what she said.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Kiriakou said the agency&#8217;s analysts were just as consistent on what a war would cost. <strong>&#8220;The CIA was pretty consistent that this was a bad idea from the very beginning,&#8221;<\/strong> he said, arguing that the analysis held &#8220;the Iranians were far tougher than we as policymakers believed.&#8221; In his telling, a look at the map was enough: Iran is &#8220;the size as the whole of Western Europe,&#8221; ringed by mountains on three sides, with &#8220;92 million people, all of whom will go to their deaths to protect their homeland.&#8221; Conquering it, he said, would have taken &#8220;one million ground troops.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>He also pointed to a leak from &#8220;less than three weeks ago.&#8221; <strong>A CIA &#8220;red cell&#8221; team, the kind of group meant to &#8220;think outside the box,&#8221; had concluded that &#8220;it was Israel that could break up and fall apart and cease to exist because of all of this, not Iran,&#8221;<\/strong> 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, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.zerohedge.com\/markets\/fbi-arrests-cia-contractor-accused-leaking-classified-defense-secrets-romantic-partner\">as we reported<\/a>. His case is ongoing, and Kiriakou&#8217;s account of what the red cell concluded rests on the leaked reporting, not on a document we have seen.<\/p>\n<p>The segment was part of a broader hour in which Johnson and Kiriakou argued that Trump&#8217;s Iran policy cost Republicans in Tuesday&#8217;s midterms. Both are known critics of the war, and the claims above are theirs.<\/p>\n<div align=\"center\">\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">INTEL Roundtable 6-NOV w\/ Larry Johnson &amp;amp; John Kiriakou &#8211; Weekly Wrap https:\/\/t.co\/cpZZSsq0c3<\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Judge Napolitano (@Judgenap) <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/Judgenap\/status\/2118810693373694217?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">November 6, 2026<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.x.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.zerohedge.com\/political\/ex-cia-officer-says-agency-delivered-same-iran-verdict-three-times-war\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Three times the CIA assessed Iran\u2019s ability to produce a nuclear weapon and each time the agency concluded that it did not have a nuclear weapons program. However, rather than listen to U.S. intelligence Trump instead took heed of Mossad<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":92983,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[77],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-332874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-feature-posts"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332874","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=332874"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332874\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":332875,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332874\/revisions\/332875"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=332874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=332874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=332874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}