In a 72-minute interview with podcaster Michael Franzese, former CIA agent and Senate staffer John Kiriakou told the former Colombo crime-family caporegime that, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio inadvertently revealed, Israel forced the U.S. to attack Iran to by threatening to use nuclear weapons against the Persian Gulf nation.
Kiriakou also alleged that deceased sex fiend and Wall Street tycoon Jeffrey Epstein was an Israeli intelligence agent and was murdered in his federal prison cell. Epstein rose to become a wealthy man, Kiriakou claimed, because he was in a homosexual relationship with billionaire Les Wexner. But Mossad, he said, recruited Epstein to target Wexner and enter the world of high finance.
And Donald Trump’s administration isn’t just withholding more than three million files on Epstein. Despite federal laws requiring the release of all the files on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the administration has not done so. Some 10,000 files remain locked up. The reason: All of them mention Israel, which was furious because Kennedy opposed its acquisition of nuclear technology.
Netanyahu Buffaloed Trump
As far as the war in Iran goes, Kiriakou disclosed its disturbing beginning. Franzese asked him whether Israel controlled the United States and whether the U.S. attack on Iran was really “Israel’s war.”
The former CIA agent, who went to prison for revealing the agency’s waterboarding of al-Qaeda terrorists, told Franzese that every Israeli prime minister going back four decades had asked every U.S. president to bomb Iran. And every president, he said, said no. Until Trump.
Kiriakou confirmed Rubio’s claim, which Trump later denied, that the U.S. attacked Iran to protect American regional assets because Israel would attack with or without U.S. approval. “We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties, and perhaps even higher [numbers] killed,” Rubio said.
Rubio didn’t say that Israel planned to hit Iran with nukes.
“There was this constant drumbeat of pressure from the Israelis that we’ve got to bomb Iran, you gotta bomb Iran,” Kiriakou said:
Well, we didn’t bomb Iran until Donald Trump. And I have friends at the White House. I have friends in the administration. And they all tell me the same thing. They say that Trump agreed to bomb Iran because Benjamin Netanyahu threatened him and told him, “If you don’t bomb Iran, we’re going to use nuclear weapons against Iran.” Of course, the Israelis have never admitted that they have a nuclear program, but analysts believe that they have between 80 and 200 nuclear warheads.
Kiriakou also told the former Mafia chieftain that Israel has claimed for years that Iran was just months away from developing a nuclear weapon. The CIA, he said, reported that they were not developing a nuclear weapon, and that Iran’s former leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — killed in the attack on Iran — pronounced a fatwa that included a death sentence on anyone who created a nuclear weapon.
Epstein a Mossad Agent
Kiriakou also said Epstein was an “access agent,” probably for Mossad.
“Let’s say that you are a foreign intelligence service and you want information from some of the most powerful, some of the most important people on earth,” Kiriakou said:
You’re not going to recruit Bill Clinton, or Bill Gates, or Prince Andrew, or the British ambassador to the United States. Those people are not recruitable, and they don’t need money, so money is not going to motivate them. So you hire, instead, somebody who has access to those people, somebody who can wine them and dine them, make them comfortable, have them drop their guard. They speak a little bit out of school, and then you can report that back to your handlers. That’s valuable information. … I believe that Mossad recruited Jeffrey Epstein, as an access agent, either to collect information from these very, very important people, or to plant the Mossad’s point of view on XYZ issue in the minds of these very important people.
Kiriakou said the latest dump of Epstein files shows that Epstein “repeatedly” contacted the CIA and FBI to volunteer to work for them. He also contacted British intelligence, and even Russian intelligence, and sought a one-on-one meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. That was rejected. “I think this was all about the Mossad,” Kiriakou said.
The former senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said Epstein and Wexner were “lovers.” The Bath & Body Works founder “adopted” Epstein to manage his billions for no explicable reason, Kiriakou said. “Why Jeffrey Epstein? So, I think that the Israelis directed him to target Les Wexner,” who put Epstein in touch with the Rothschilds. “The guy was a seventh-grade substitute math teacher with no college degree and he’s managing the Rothschild family’s billions?” Kiriakou said. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
He said Epstein’s work for Mossad was “one of these very long-term operations,” noting that Israelis, Russians, and Cubans will manage an agent for decades.
Kiriakou said the government is withholding up to 3 million files on Epstein that will never be released per U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi. “There is something there that is embarrassing, that is humiliating, that is possibly dangerous, that they just don’t want us to know about.”
He cited the repeated references to “beef jerky.”
“What are they actually talking about?” he asked:
There are more questions now, after the release of [the first] three million pages, than we had before we knew anything at all.
And Epstein, he believes, did not commit suicide: “I’ve finally come around to the murder issue.”
JFK and the Israelis
Franzese also inquired about the Kennedy assassination. Other Mafiosi, including his father, Sonny, told him the mob murdered Kennedy. Kiriakou discussed that and whether the CIA was behind the assassination. But he added that Trump did not, as widely believed, release all the JFK files, as required by law.
A friend who is close to President Trump told Kiriakou that 10,000 JFK documents will never be released “because every single one of them points directly at Israel”:
I said, “Oh man, that’s not one I was thinking of.” He says that the Israelis were so angry that A) John Kennedy wouldn’t give them nuclear technology, but more importantly, B) he was actively trying to disrupt the Israelis from acquiring nuclear technology, and they decided they had to take him out.
On X, Franzese explained that Kiriakou’s revelations caused him to reconsider what he thought about Epstein, Israel, and the war with Iran. “I don’t say this lightly,” he wrote. “This one actually made me rethink some things.”
