Trump official: CIA director ‘takes dictation’ from Mossad on Iran

By Max Blumenthal and Anya Parampil – The Grayzone

A Trump administration official tells The Grayzone that the Israeli Mossad is using CIA Director John Ratcliffe and CENTCOM chief General Michael Kurilla to influence Trump with manipulated intelligence about Iran’s nuclear program. Inside the White House, dissidents have been isolated, paving the way for a regime-change war that could cost American lives.

An official in President Donald Trump’s administration told The Grayzone that CIA Director John Ratcliffe and CENTCOM Commander General Michael Kurilla have become vehicles for the Mossad and the Israeli military as they seek to manipulate the United States into attacking Iran. The official referred to Ratcliffe as “the Mossad transcriber.”

According to this official, Ratcliffe and Kurilla have pressured Trump to join Israel’s war more directly by regurgitating inflated reports they receive from the Israeli military and Mossad director David Barnea, but without informing the president that this intelligence was derived from a foreign third party.

During administration meetings with Israeli intelligence officials, including Barnea, the official said Tel Aviv has demonstrated a single-minded focus on regime change, clamoring for authorization to assassinate Iran’s leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Israeli officials have emphasized that the time to eliminate him is now.

The issue of nuclear enrichment capabilities is a secondary concern in the Israeli presentations, which the administration official characterized as tactless and hyper-aggressive fear-mongering exercises.

At one point, the administration official recalled, an Israeli intelligence briefer stated that Iran could transfer a nuclear weapon to Yemen’s Houthis in less than a week.

According to the official, Trump’s chief negotiator, Steve Witkoff, has pressured the president to maintain diplomatic ground. However, an Israeli assassination of Khamenei could almost certainly be the nail in the coffin of nuclear negotiations, which is precisely what the Israelis are determined to do.

If the United States enters the war by attacking Iran, the official fears that Iran will activate the Popular Mobilization Units (supported by the Revolutionary Guard Corps) to attack US troops and bases in Iraq and Syria, leading to US casualties and provoking an escalation beyond the initial scope of the nuclear program.

Having launched a destructive war of attrition with Iran, Tel Aviv is deploying every means at its disposal to force the United States to jump headlong into the conflict it started, but cannot end on its own.

Within the Trump administration, the source told The Grayzone that key officials who have questioned the logic of attacking the Islamic Republic, such as Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and her deputy, former CIA officer and director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Joe Kent, have been excluded from meetings by Chief of Staff Suzie Wiles.

Taking the lead in briefings with the president is a highly suggestible CIA director groomed by Israel since he first entered Congress.

AIPAC director boasts of his influence over Ratcliffe

This April, The Grayzone published exclusive audio of AIPAC CEO Elliot Brand’s remarks at an off-the-record Israel lobby session in Washington, boasting about the organization’s success in recruiting members of Congress and describing the CIA director as a “helping hand” within the administration.

“You know, one of the first candidates I ever met when I was running for Congress as an AIPAC professional at my job was a guy named John Ratcliffe,” Brandt recalled.

“I was challenging a longtime congressman in Dallas. I said to myself, this guy looks like he could win the race, and we went to talk to him. He had a good understanding of the issues, and a couple of weeks ago, he was sworn in as director of the CIA, for God’s sake. This is a guy we had a chance to talk to, so there are, there are quite a few, I would call them helping hands; we have helping hands in there.”

In addition to Ratcliffe, Brandt also named Marco Rubio and Mike Waltz, two former Republican congressmen cultivated by AIPAC before their appointment to key national security positions in the Trump administration. “They all have relationships with key AIPAC leaders in their communities,” the CEO said. “So the lines of communication are good if there’s anything questionable or curious, and we need access to the conversation within those spaces.”

This May, Waltz was exposed by his colleagues for secretly coordinating with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to orchestrate a US attack on Iran, costing him his job as head of the National Security Council.

Secretary of State Rubio assumed the role of acting director of national security, granting him control over cabinet-level positions that no other official has had since Henry Kissinger. Meanwhile, Ratcliffe emerged as the key conduit for Israeli influence in the administration.

A mayor of a small town in Texas becomes an Israeli agent in a big way.

With no experience in the military or intelligence, Ratcliffe spent the early part of his political career as mayor of Heath, a small town outside Dallas, interrupted by a brief one-year stint as U.S. Attorney between 2007 and 2008.

Ratcliffe entered Congress in 2014, and emerged two years later as one of Trump’s fiercest attack dogs on the Judiciary Committee. The backbencher also served on the House Intelligence Committee.

Trump rewarded Ratfcliffe’s loyalty by nominating him as Director of National Intelligence in 2019, but quickly withdrew his nomination after he was exposed for lying about his role in several federal terrorism cases.

His most absurd exaggeration came at the trial of the directors of the Dallas-based Holy Land Relief and Development Foundation , where he boasted that he “convicted individuals who were funneling money to Hamas behind the front of a charitable organization.”

However, Ratcliffe played no discernible role in the case, prompting several Republican senators to withdraw their support for the nomination when the lie came to light.

It is notable, however, that Ratcliffe sought credit for bringing down the Holy Land Foundation, as the case was one of the most politicized and dubious prosecutions of the Bush-era “war on terror,” resulting in life sentences for Palestinian-American defendants whose sole crime was sending charitable donations to organizations in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip that were not on any government watch lists and that also received support from the International Committee of the Red Cross and USAID. Furthermore, the case was heavily influenced by Israeli intelligence.

Following a mistrial that proved embarrassing for the US government, the Mossad dispatched an agent to Texas to testify against the directors of Holy Land. The judge allowed the agent to testify against the foundation’s directors under the assumed identity of “Avi.”

The agent proceeded to boast of a series of questionable documents that supposedly proved that the Foundation was created as the nexus of a vast terrorist financing network that facilitated several suicide bombings carried out by Hamas.

While Ratcliffe’s fantastical claims about his role in the case scuttled his nomination in 2019, Trump successfully installed him as his director of national intelligence the following year, paving the way for his nomination as CIA director upon his reelection. In 2024, the Jewish newspaper Forward listed Ratcliffe among the “Jewish advisers and pro-Israel cabinet.”

Chief of Staff isolates Trump with “Israel’s favorite general”

The administration official told The Grayzone that White House Chief of Staff Suzie Wiles made sure the president was surrounded by Ratcliffe and General Michael Kurilla during Iran-related briefings .

 

Ratcliffe is said to take dictation from Mossad and read documents they prepared for the president without any sense of critical detachment, or revealing that the assessments came from a foreign liaison rather than US intelligence.

And then there is General Kurilla, who appears singularly focused in these meetings with Trump on making the case for an attack on Iran. In 2024, the pro-Netanyahu Israeli outlet Israel Hayon described Kurilla as “a vital asset for Israel.” The British Telegraph, in June, called him “Israel’s favorite general.”

Former Pentagon officials have even speculated that Israel’s decision to launch an unprovoked surprise attack against Iran on June 13 was partly influenced by Kurilla’s near-retirement in July, since Tel Aviv did not want to go to war without him at CENTCOM.

The administration official told The Grayzone that Wiles had excluded Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence, from crucial meetings where U.S. involvement in Iran was discussed.

This includes one on June 8 at Camp David where Ratcliffe used a clumsy sports metaphor to insist that Iran was just days away from producing a nuclear weapon: “That’s like saying they’re in the box after overcoming all the defenses and they have no intention of scoring,” he told Trump.

Two days later, Gabbard posted a video on social media invoking the destruction of the Japanese city of Hiroshima by a US nuclear bomb in 1945, and warned that a similar horror could soon be unleashed because “warmongers in the political elite are fomenting fear and careless tensions between nuclear powers.”

Trump was reportedly enraged by her comments. When asked by a reporter about Gabbard’s March testimony that Iran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program, Trump grumbled, “I don’t care what she said,” then echoed Ratcliffe’s and, by extension, the Israelis’ perspective: “I think they’re very close to having it.”

This may explain why Gabbard published a June 20 statement on X insisting that her position on Iran’s nuclear enrichment was closely aligned with Trump’s and had been distorted by “a dishonest media” seeking to “manufacture divisions.” Although she reaffirmed her commitment to the president in the statement, her assessment of Iran’s nuclear program is no different from the assessment she delivered in March, which determined that Iran was not currently pursuing an atomic bomb.

“The United States has intelligence that Iran is at the point where it can produce a nuclear weapon within weeks to months,” Gabbard alleged in X, “if they decide to complete assembly.”

According to the Trump official, Chief of Staff Wiles also excluded Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth from the meetings, instead relying on Kurilla to represent the military.

Vice President JD Vance has held a series of side meetings on the topic, the official said. In contrast to those controlled by Wiles, Vance has encouraged robust debate and included diverse perspectives. Publicly, however, Vance is constrained by the obligation to demonstrate loyalty to Trump.

For his part, Trump’s views are said to be shaped by constant exposure to Fox News, which in the past two weeks has transformed into a 24/7 commercial for the Iran war.

Fox’s coverage has become transparently influenced by Israel’s propaganda machine, which Steve Bannon, the intellectual architect of the America First movement, called for an investigation under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

As Trump returns to Washington on June 21, Bannon lamented that “the party’s about to start,” suggesting the president has decided to go to war on behalf of Israel.