John Kiriakou

The Iranians weren't the threat to us.

Seems to me like something might happen in the next two or three weeks.

You know, Megan, I have to say in all the years that I was in the CIA, literally every time an Israeli prime minister came to the United States and they come all the time.

Regardless of who happened to be the president, whether it was Ronald Reagan all the way into Donald Trump's first term, every single Israeli prime minister would come and say, please bomb Iran, please bomb Iran, please bomb Iran.

And every president would say, no, we're not going to bomb Iran.

until this president.

And the Israelis from 1986, the Israelis have been saying that the Iranians were six months away from a nuclear bomb.

Just simply not true.

The CIA in the last 20 years has written two national intelligence estimates.

Now, this is a sense of the entire intelligence community.

concluding both times that the Iranians did not have a nuclear weapons program.

Besides the fact that Ayatollah Khamenei, the late Ayatollah Khamenei, issued a fatwa, a religious decree in 2003, saying that it was a sin to have a nuclear weapons program and that the government was forbidden from doing so.

There's no evidence that they had a nuclear weapons program, except for what the Israelis have been saying.

And I think the Israelis made it up.

Right.

I got a degree in Middle Eastern studies at George Washington University.

And to tell you the truth, I wasn't ready to go into real life yet.

So I stayed for a master's degree in legislative affairs with a focus being on American foreign policy analysis.

And I was taking a class called the psychology of leadership with Dr. Gerald Post, who was an eminent psychiatrist.

He gave us an assignment, quite a controversial assignment, to shadow our bosses and then to write a psychological profile of our bosses.