Before the first bomb fell on Tehran, a former CIA counterterrorism chief says Israel had already made the decision for us, and gave us no choice. That sounds improbable, but fifty-two years ago, Israel rolled nuclear missiles onto a launchpad and pointed them at the world until America complied. Last week, America complied again. This is the story of how that works.
John Kiriakou spent fourteen years inside the Central Intelligence Agency, the first eight as a Middle East analyst specializing in Iraqi intelligence, and at 26 years-old found himself on the couch in the Oval Office, briefing President H.W. Bush, the Vice President, National Security director, and Director of the CIA on Saddam Hussein’s frame of mind. Fifteen years later, he’d serve another President Bush, in an even more important role.
Kiriakou learned Arabic to professional fluency, served at the American Embassy in Bahrain, was posted to Athens, where he recruited foreign assets for the United States government, survived an assassination attempt by Greek leftist militants, and returned to Langley just in time for the September 11th attacks to reorganize the world around him. In their aftermath, he was named Chief of Counterterrorist Operations in Pakistan, where he led the raids that dismantled al-Qaeda safehouses across Faisalabad and personally commanded the March 2002 operation that captured Abu Zubaydah, then regarded as al-Qaeda’s third-ranking official and among the most consequential counterterrorism arrests of the post-9/11 era.
He later served as Senior Investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. When he went public in 2007 to confirm that the CIA was waterboarding detainees and that it constituted torture, the United States government thanked him by making him the only person imprisoned in connection with the CIA’s torture program, and the second to be prosecuted for espionage for talking to the media. He was a patriot whistle-blower who wanted the American people to know their president was lying to their face (and the other was a loose woman who gave it to her paramour because she was stupid). In fact, they tried to imprison him for the rest of his life, and declassified docs show that Obama’s Justice Department decided to prosecute him just to bankrupt him, admitting at the time they filed charges that he did nothing illegal. And once behind bars, they orchestrated several scenarios, likely hoping he’d be murdered.
I give all that background to say he’s the only ex-spook I’d ever trust, because as the expression goes, “there’s no such thing as an ex-spook.” I think he’s the exception to the rule.
That is the man who sat down on the Julian Dorey Podcast before American and Israeli forces began bombing Iran, and told his audience that a former CIA colleague who had just left the White House informed him the decision to strike had already been made. He identified the internal fault lines: Vance and Gabbard opposed it; Rubio, Hegseth, and the Joint Chiefs, recently restocked with Trump loyalists, supported it. He explained that Trump had replaced every Joint Chief within the prior twelve months with officers chosen for political reliability, which accounted for a military leadership posture that would historically have counseled restraint. And he stated (citing sources he described as coming from the highest levels of the American intelligence community) that Israel had delivered to Trump an ultimatum with no viable exit: strike Iran’s nuclear facilities with American forces, or Israel would do it with nuclear weapons.
Seven days later, the bombs fell.
THE SAMSON PROTOCOLS
Trump ran on no new wars. He called Iraq a disastrous mistake. As recently as May 2025 he told the Gulf states those days were over. Last June, he was visibly reluctant, hedging for eight days after Israel launched unilaterally, while his own diplomats were still in Geneva negotiating a nuclear deal. He called the eventual American strikes limited. Called them a one-off. Nine months later, Khamenei is dead, and American bombers are back over Iran.
So when a senior intelligence community source tells a decorated CIA veteran that Israel threatened to go nuclear unless Trump pulled the trigger, the bewilderment people feel is legitimate. But it should not be a surprise. This mechanism is fifty-two years old.
On the night of October 8th, 1973, Israel was losing the Yom Kippur War. Egypt had crossed the Suez Canal. Syrian tanks were pouring through the Golan Heights. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan told Prime Minister Golda Meir they were looking at “the end of the third temple.” In Israeli military code, the temple meant the state. And the end of the state had a specific response already planned and waiting.
Thirteen nuclear warheads were assembled and readied. Jericho missiles were rolled out of their storage caves at Sdot Micha Airbase on railway cars and positioned for launch. F-4 Phantom aircraft at Tel Nof were loaded with weapons carrying radiation signatures consistent with nuclear payloads. American reconnaissance satellites detected all of it. An SR-71 Blackbird overflying Israel picked up the radiation directly.
This was not operational sloppiness. Israel wanted Washington to see it.
Israeli Ambassador Simcha Dinitz met with Henry Kissinger and delivered a warning phrased carefully enough to preserve deniability but clear enough that no interpretation was possible: if the United States did not provide immediate and massive military resupply, Israel would be forced toward “very serious conclusions.” Nobody in that room needed a translator. If America did not act, Israel would use what it had just rolled onto the launchpad. The Soviets would face unbearable pressure to respond. The global nonproliferation order would disintegrate overnight. And the catastrophe, as Israeli officials made plain without saying it plainly, would be America’s failure to prevent.
Nixon authorized Operation Nickel Grass the same day Kissinger briefed him. Over three weeks, the United States delivered 22,325 tons of war material to Israel. Tanks, fighter jets, missiles, ammunition, arriving every fifteen minutes at the peak of the operation. Not enough to stabilize the situation. Enough to let Israel go on the offensive, cross the Suez Canal, encircle the Egyptian Third Army, and threaten Cairo. The nuclear weapons were stood down. The crisis ended. Israel won.
And America learned a lesson it has never been allowed to unlearn. No consequences followed. No demands for acknowledgment. No guarantees that it will not happen again. What happened instead was quieter and more permanent. American policy toward Israel restructured itself around the logic the crisis had demonstrated. A cornered Israel signals nuclear readiness. Nuclear signaling risks superpower escalation. Therefore, the only rational American posture is to ensure Israel is never cornered. Unconditional military aid. Guaranteed regional superiority. Fifty-plus UN vetoes. Four billion dollars annually with no strings attached.
The doctrine has a name. Israelis call it the Samson Option, after the biblical figure who brought the temple down on himself and his enemies when defeat was inevitable. Military historian Martin van Creveld articulated it openly: we have the capability to take the world down with us, and that will happen before Israel goes under. Moshe Dayan, the architect of the 1973 alert, framed the underlying philosophy more simply. Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.
The doctrine was never retired. It never needed to be stated again after 1973 because the demonstration already did the work. Every president since Nixon has governed with the same unspoken understanding underneath every interaction with Jerusalem. Do not push Israel into a corner. A cornered Israel does not negotiate.
DEATH TO AMERICA
When Iranians chant “death to America,” American media treats it as evidence of savagery. It is broadcast as proof that these are irrational people who hate freedom, hate prosperity, hate the West for no reason that rational minds can process. The chant becomes the entire story. It becomes the justification. It becomes the thing that allows an American audience to watch bombs falling on Tehran and feel, if not good about it, at least not troubled.
I am not excusing the chant. But what people chant is not a moral authorization to kill them, and it is certainly not authorization to kill the civilians who had no voice in the government that taught them to chant it. My purpose here is the opposite of justification. My purpose is explanation, because explanation is what has been systematically withheld from the American public for seventy years, and without it you cannot understand anything that is happening right now.
So here is the explanation. In 1953, Iran had a democracy. Mohammed Mossadegh was a popular, secular, elected prime minister who made the catastrophic mistake of nationalizing Iranian oil, which had been controlled by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, a British corporation that was paying Iran roughly sixteen cents on every dollar of profit extracted from Iranian soil. Mossadegh said that Iranian oil should benefit Iranians. The British, obviously, did not like this. They called the CIA, and Operation Ajax removed Mossadegh from power, installed the Shah, and handed Iranian oil back to Western corporations.
The CIA’s own historian later described the coup as the event that transformed Iran from a constitutional monarchy into an absolutist dictatorship and set in motion the chain of consequences that produced the 1979 revolution. America destroyed Iranian democracy and then spent twenty-six years propping up the brutal secret police state that replaced it. SAVAK, the Shah’s intelligence service, was trained and funded by the CIA. Its specialty was torture.
When the revolution came in 1979, it came with twenty-six years of accumulated American fingerprints on Iranian suffering. The hostage crisis that followed, the one that every American remembers, happened in a country that had just overthrown a government America installed and sustained. That context does not make the hostage-taking right. It makes it comprehensible.
Then, in 1980, Saddam Hussein invaded Iran. The United States backed Saddam. When Iraqi forces deployed chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers, including sarin and mustard gas that killed and maimed tens of thousands, the Reagan administration provided the satellite intelligence that made those attacks possible and shielded Iraq from United Nations consequences. Iranian soldiers died in American-assisted chemical weapons strikes. Their families buried what was left of them. The United States then shot down Iran Air Flight 655 in 1988, killing all 290 civilians aboard, including 66 children. The ship’s captain received the Legion of Merit. Iran received no apology.
In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq and destroyed Iran’s primary regional adversary, which sounds like it would benefit Iran, and in some ways it did. But it also unleashed a sectarian catastrophe on Iran’s western border, produced a refugee crisis, empowered the most extreme factions on all sides, and demonstrated to the Iranian government with absolute clarity that countries without nuclear weapons get invaded and countries with nuclear weapons do not. America taught Iran the lesson that American officials now cite as justification for bombing Iran.
We then spent the next two decades strangling the Iranian economy with sanctions that fell hardest on ordinary Iranians, the same ordinary Iranians who had, in survey after survey, demonstrated more pro-Western sentiment than any other population in the Middle East. The people who liked us most, we punished most.
So when Iranians chant death to America, they are chanting about all of that. They are chanting about a coup that stole their democracy. They are chanting about a dictator we funded and a secret police force we trained. They are chanting about chemical weapons we helped aim at their fathers and sons. They are chanting about 290 civilians we shot out of the sky and never apologized for.
We would be angry too. Any honest person knows it. The anger is not a mystery. It is a receipt.
COLOR REVOLUTION
Images are already circulating of Iranians in the streets, celebrating, some of them cheering the death of Khamenei, waving flags, and smiling at cameras. American commentators are sharing the footage with captions about freedom and liberation. The message being transmitted to the American public is straightforward: the Iranian people are happy, they wanted this, and we did them a favor.
Understand what you are actually looking at before you share that footage, because the happiness is real, and so is the suffering that produced it, and that suffering was not an accident or a side effect. For decades, the United States has waged economic warfare against the Iranian civilian population through a sanctions regime so comprehensive and so deliberately punishing that it functions as collective punishment on a grand scale.
Sanctions block medicine. Sanctions collapse currencies. Sanctions destroy the savings of middle-class families who had nothing to do with their government’s nuclear program and no meaningful ability to change it. Sanctions cause inflation that makes food unaffordable, isolate a population from the global economy, and grind down ordinary life until desperation becomes the baseline. The theory, never stated publicly but universally understood inside the foreign policy establishment, is that if you make civilians miserable enough and hungry enough and hopeless enough, they will eventually overthrow their own government and save you the trouble of doing it yourself.
That is torture conducted at a national scale, with spreadsheets and treasury orders substituting for the cruder instruments. The CIA has a long institutional history of combining economic strangulation with what it calls color revolution tactics, layering information operations, support for internal opposition movements, and carefully timed external pressure on top of the economic misery until the population reaches a breaking point. We watched the same architecture deployed in Venezuela. We watched it in Ukraine.
The playbook is not classified, and it is not subtle: Create unbearable conditions, cultivate internal fractures, and either the government falls on its own, or you have a humanitarian narrative ready to justify pushing it over yourself. The people celebrating in the streets of Iran are doing so because they have lived under that compounded pressure for decades. Their joy is genuine. The machinery that produced their desperation was assembled in Washington and Tel Aviv, and we should be honest about that even while we acknowledge the relief they feel today.
There is one more point that deserves to be made: sanctions are not a substitute for war. Sanctions are the first stage of war.
When the United States begins deploying a comprehensive sanctions regime against a nation, people in Pentagon basements, Langley conference rooms, and Tel Aviv planning offices are already drawing up military timelines, because sanctions are designed to soften a target. They’re not designed to change behavior (they never do). The best illustration I can give for this, is how siege warfare back in the olden days served the purpose of weakening the city before the attack; often times, larger forces that could successful breach walls without a problem, still encamped with a blockade around their target for weeks, so that when they did breach the walls, the people inside would be too starved and demoralized to put up much of a fight. Those are sanctions.
NOTE: Sometimes nations under sanction take offensive military actions, and then we say, “See? They attacked us unprovoked. Sanctions are warfare,and we can’t blame them for acting like it.
They degrade military readiness by strangling defense budgets. They erode civilian morale and strain internal political cohesion. They create the humanitarian conditions that will later be packaged as justification for intervention. Sanctions are the agricultural phase of a harvest that ends in bombs, and the pattern repeats without variation across every major American military engagement of the last fifty years.
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