The recent Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) assessment claiming that the U.S. bombing of Iran set the country’s nuclear weapons program back only a few months was irresponsible and probably intended to undermine President Trump’s foreign policy. This assessment was written to be leaked to the press and reflected a long pattern of politicized intelligence analysis to undermine Republican presidents.
The DIA assessment was not credible because a battle damage assessment of the bombing of Iran’s Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan nuclear sites will be complicated and probably take weeks or months of intelligence collection and analysis by dozens of experts and other intelligence agencies. A low-confidence assessment, like the DIA analysis issued 24 hours after the bombings, was a fraud and an abuse of intelligence to produce a high-profile assessment that deliberately misrepresented the outcome of the U.S. attack and helped the president’s political adversaries use the bombings to hurt him politically. Not surprisingly, this assessment was quickly leaked to the press.
The DIA assessment followed similar efforts by U.S. intelligence agencies and the left to deny that Iran had a nuclear weapons program.
Last weekend, Secretary of State Marco Rubio did an extraordinary interview with Margaret Brennan on CBS’s Face the Nation that hinged on the misleading way U.S. intelligence agencies have long framed Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
Brennan demanded that Rubio tell her what intelligence the Trump administration had indicating that Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenei ordered the construction of nuclear weapons. She claimed the U.S. Intelligence Community had not seen such intelligence and that this was a crucial element of its analysis of Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
Rubio dismissed Brennan’s question as irrelevant because Iran’s extensive nuclear weapons-related work indicates it intends to make nuclear weapons. Rubio told Brennan, “We have intelligence that they have everything they need to build a nuclear weapon, and that’s more than enough.” He cited nuclear weapons activities such as enriching uranium to 60%—a level with no peaceful purpose—and building a uranium enrichment facility deep inside a mountain.
Prior to 2007, the U.S. Intelligence Community had assessed that Iran had a nuclear weapons program. But in November 2007, fearing that President Bush might order an attack on Iran’s nuclear program, a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) was published by the National Intelligence Council that found Iran’s nuclear program was halted in 2003 and Iranian leaders had not made a decision to resume weaponization efforts and construct a nuclear weapon.
The NIE’s conclusion was a deceptive argument. It is true that Iran’s nuclear weapons program was slowed in 2003 after the U.S. invasion of Iraq and some weapons activities were suspended. However, other critical nuclear weapons work was conducted in secret. Dual-use nuclear activities with plausible peaceful purposes were continued, such as uranium enrichment. In addition, Israel learned from documents it stole from Iran in 2018 on the Iranian nuclear weapons program that Tehran began an aggressive program in 2003 to deceive the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors about its covert nuclear weapons effort.
The 2007 NIE was extremely controversial at the time. To reach the conclusion that Iran’s nuclear program was not weapons-related, it excluded uranium enrichment as evidence of weaponization. In a December 5, 2007, editorial on the NIE, The Wall Street Journal cited an intelligence source who described the NIE’s principal authors as “hyper-partisan anti-Bush officials.” Former CIA Director James Schlesinger and Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz mocked the NIE as “stupid intelligence.”
Since the 2007 NIE was published, plenty of evidence has surfaced on covert Iranian nuclear weapons work. Iran was censured in June 2022, November 2024, and June 2025 for refusing to cooperate with IAEA investigations, especially of two sites where there was evidence of nuclear weapons work. There is substantial evidence of Iran cheating on the 2015 nuclear deal, the JCPOA. This included Iran’s secret development of advanced centrifuges while the JCPOA was in effect. This allowed Iran to increase its uranium enrichment to 60% during the Biden administration. As a result, they had enough 60% enriched uranium by the end of May 2025 to fuel 9 or 10 nuclear bombs if further enriched to weapons-grade.
But none of this evidence mattered to the deep state analysts of America’s intelligence agencies, who refused to budge from their position that because they had no evidence that Iranian leaders had ordered the assembly of a nuclear weapon, they could not conclude that Iran had a program to build a nuclear bomb or that Iranian leaders would ever issue an order to build one.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe challenged this tendentious argument last week when he testified to a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing, “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.”
What Ratcliffe and Rubio argued is that Iran’s investment of billions in nuclear weapons activity with no peaceful purpose, its censure for refusing to cooperate with IAEA inspections and its capacity to quickly produce nine to ten nuclear weapons are why Iran’s nuclear effort is an active nuclear weapons program. Rubio is right: it doesn’t matter that Iran’s leaders have not ordered the final step to start assembling nuclear bombs.
Why did DIA issue its premature and politicized assessment of the recent U.S. bombings of Iran? Why did U.S. intelligence agencies issue slanted assessments for almost 25 years, denying that Iran was pursuing nuclear weapons?
The reason is that our intelligence agencies have been captured by a left-wing, globalist culture that reflexively produces the same kind of foreign policy analysis issued by liberal think tanks and the New York Times editorial page. It regularly politicizes intelligence to promote Democratic presidents and undermine Republican presidents. Then-Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe issued a letter about this in January 2021 on how intelligence analysts slanted their analysis of possible Chinese and Russian meddling in the 2020 election to help prevent Trump from winning reelection.
The DIA assessment is a wake-up call about the serious problem of politicized U.S. intelligence analysis. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has begun to address this problem by reassigning National Intelligence Council senior analysts for politicizing national intelligence estimates. Much more must be done to depoliticize American intelligence analysis and win back the confidence of President Trump.
Fred Fleitz previously served as National Security Council chief of staff, CIA analyst, and a House Intelligence Committee staff member. He was a member of the CIA Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control Center and served as a U.S. delegate to the IAEA Board of Governors.