Trump official to The Grayzone: CIA's Ratcliffe acts as 'Mossad stenographer' on Iran

A Trump official tells The Grayzone the Mossad is using CIA Director John Ratcliffe and US CENTCOM's Gen. Michael Kurilla to influence Trump with cooked intelligence on Iran's nuclear program.

By Max Blumenthal and Anya Parampil

An official in the administration of President Donald Trump has told The Grayzone that CIA Director John Ratcliffe and US CENTCOM Commander Gen. Michael Kurilla have become vehicles for Israel's Mossad and military as they seek to manipulate the US into attacking Iran. The official referred to Ratcliffe as "Mossad's stenographer."

According to the official, Ratcliffe and Kurilla have pressured Trump to join Israel's war more directly by regurgitating overblown briefings they received from the Israeli military and Mossad director David Barnea – but without informing the president they the intelligence derived from a foreign third party.

During the Trump administration's meetings with Israeli intelligence officials including Barnea, the official said the Israelis have demonstrated a single-minded focus on regime change, clamoring for authorization to assassinate Iran's leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The official have emphasized that the moment to take out Khamenei is now.

The issue of Iran's nuclear enrichment capacity is of secondary concern in the Israelis' presentations, which the official characterized as tactless, hyper-aggressive exercises in fear-mongering. At one point, the Trump official recalled, an Israeli intelligence briefer declared that Iran could transfer a nuclear weapon to Yemen's Houthi militia in less than a week.

According to the official, Trump's lead negotiator with Iran, Steve Witkoff, has been pushing the president to preserve the diplomatic track. However, an Israeli assassination of Khamanei would almost certainly be the nail in the coffin of nuclear negotiations – which is precisely why the Israelis seem so determined to do it.

If the US enters the war by attacking Iran, the official fears that Iran will activate IRGC-backed Popular Mobilization Units to attack US troops and bases in Iraq and Syria, leading to American casualties and triggering escalation well beyond the initial scope of Iran's nuclear program.

Having launched a damaging war of attrition with Iran, Tel Aviv is deploying every mechanism at its disposal to compel the US to lurch headlong into the conflict it initiated, but which it can not finish on its own.

Inside the Trump administration, the source told The Grayzone that top officials who have questioned the logic of attacking Iran such as Director of Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and her deputy, former CIA officer and director for the National Counter-Terrorism Center Joe Kent, have been excluded from meetings by White House Chief of Staff Suzie Wiles.

Taking the lead in briefing the president is a highly suggestible CIA director whom Israel has groomed since he first entered Congress.

AIPAC director boasts of influence over Ratcliffe

This April, The Grayzone released exclusive audio of remarks by AIPAC CEO Elliot Brandt to an off-the-record Israel lobby session in Washington DC. Boasting of his organization's success in recruiting members of Congress, he described CIA Director John Ratcliffe as a "lifeline" inside the administration.

“You know that one of the first candidates I ever met with as an AIPAC professional in my job when he was a candidate for Congress was a guy named John Ratcliffe,” Brandt recalled. “He was challenging a long time member of Congress in Dallas. I said, this guy looks like he could win the race, and, we go talk to him. He had a good understanding of issues, and a couple of weeks ago, he took the oath as the CIA director, for crying out loud. This is a guy that we had a chance to speak to, so there are, there are a lot – I wouldn’t call them lifelines, but there are lifelines in there.”

Besides Ratcliffe, AIPAC CEO Elliott Brandt also named Marco Rubio and Mike Waltz, two former Republican congressmen cultivated by AIPAC in advance of their appointment to key national security positions in the Trump administration.

“They all have relationships with key AIPAC leaders from their communities,” said the AIPAC CEO. “So the lines of communication are good should there be something questionable or curious, and we need access on the conversation.”

This May, Waltz was outed by colleagues for secretly coordinating with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to orchestrate a US attack on Iran, costing him his job as National Security Council director. Secretary of State Rubio assumed the role of acting National Security Director, granting him control over more cabinet level positions than any US official since Henry Kissinger. Meanwhile, Ratcliffe quickly emerged as the key channel of Israeli influence in the administration.

The CIA director has come a long way since entering politics as the mayor of a backwater Texas town with a population of 7000.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe with Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and Mossad Director David Barnea in Jerusalem, April 2025

A small town Texas mayor becomes big time Israeli asset

With no experience in the US military or intelligence, Ratcliffe spent the early part of his political career as mayor of Heath, a small town outside of Dallas, which was broken by a year-long stint as a US Attorney between 2007-08. He 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 Ratcliffe's loyalty by nominating him as Director of National Intelligence in 2019, but quickly withdrew the nomination after Ratcliffe was exposed for lying about his role in several federal terrorism cases.

His most absurd embellishment was on the prosecution of the directors of the Dallas-based Holy Land Foundation, in which he boasted that "he convicted individuals who were funneling money to Hamas behind the front of a charitable organization." In fact, Ratcliffe played no discernible role in the case at all, prompting several Republican senators to withdraw support for his nomination when the lie came to light.

It is notable nonetheless that Ratcliffe sought credit for taking down the Holy Land Foundation, as the case was one of the most politicized and legally dubious prosecutions of the Bush-era "war on terror," leading to life sentences for Palestinian American defendants whose only crime was sending charitable donations to organizations in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip which were not on any government watchlist, and which also received support from the International Committee of the Red Cross and USAID. What's more, the case was heavily influenced by Israeli intelligence.

Following a mistrial that proved embarrassing for the US government, Israel's Mossad dispatched an agent to Texas to testify against the Holy Land directors. The judge allowed the agent to testify in secret, with the courtroom cleared, and under an assumed identity as "Avi." The agent proceeded to brandish a series of questionable documents that supposedly proved the Holy Land Foundation was set up as the nexus of a vast terrorist financing network that had enabled several suicide bombings by Hamas.

While Ratcliffe's fantastical claims about his role in the case tanked his nomination in 2019, Trump successfully installed him as DNI the following year, paving the way for his nomination as CIA director upon Trump's re-election.

In 2024, the Jewish Daily Forward listed Ratcliffe among "Trump's Jewish advisors and pro-Israel cabinet."

Gen. Michael Kurilla with then-Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, March 2023

Chief of Staff Suzie Wiles isolates Trump with "Israel's favorite general"

The Trump official told The Grayzone that White House Chief of Staff Suzie Wiles has ensured that the president remains surrounded by Ratcliffe and Gen. Michael Kurilla in briefings related to Iran.

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

Then there is Gen. Kurilla, who appears singularly focused in meetings with Trump on making the case for a US attack on Iran. In 2024, the pro-Netanyahu Israeli outlet Israel Hayon described Kurilla as "a vital asset to Israel." The UK's Telegraph referred to Kurilla this June as "Israel's favorite general."

Former Pentagon officials have even speculated that Israel's decision to launch an unprovoked surprise attack on Iran this June 13 was partially influenced by Kurilla's looming retirement in July, as Tel Aviv did not want to go to war without him present at CENTCOM.

The Trump official told The Grayzone that Wiles has excluded Trump's Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, from crucial meetings where US intervention in Iran was discussed. That included a June 8 meeting at Camp David where Ratcliffe used a clumsy sports metaphor to insist that Iran was just days away from producing a nuclear weapon: "It’s like saying a football team marched 99 yards down the field, got to the one yard line and, oh, they don’t have the intention to score," he argued to Trump.

Two days later, Gabbard released a social media video invoking the American military's destruction of the Japanese city of Hiroshima with a nuclear bomb in 1945, and warned that a similar horror could soon unfold because "political elite warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers."

Trump was reportedly infuriated by her comments. Asked by a reporter about Gabbard's testimony this March that Iran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program, Trump grumbled, "I don't care what she said," then echoed Ratcliffe's view – and by extension, that of the Israelis: "I think they were very close to having [a nuclear weapon]."

This may explain why Gabbard released a June 20 statement on Twitter/X insisting that her views on Iran's nuclear enrichment were faithfully aligned with Trump's, and had been distorted by a "dishonest media" seeking to "manufacture division." Though the statement reaffirmed her commitment to President Trump, her assessment of Iran's nuclear program did not differ from the evaluation she delivered in March, which determined Iran was not currently pursuing a nuclear bomb,

"America has intelligence that Iran is at the point that it can produce a nuclear weapon within weeks to months," Gabbard claimed on Twitter/X, "if they decide to finalize the assembly."

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

Vice President JD Vance has held a parallel series of meetings on Iran, the official said. In contrast to those controlled by Wiles, Vance has encouraged robust debate and included diverse perspectives. In public, 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 has transformed in the past two weeks into a 24/7 commercial for war on Iran. Fox News' coverage has become so transparently influenced by Israel's propaganda mechanism that Steve Bannon, the former White House chief of staff and intellectual architect of the America First movement, called for a Foreign Agents Registration Act investigation of the network.

As Trump heads back to Washington on June 21, Bannon lamented that "the party is on," suggesting the president had decided to go to war on Israel's behalf.