The buildup and aftermath of the unprecedented U.S. military operation targeting three of Iran’s nuclear facilities has seemingly laid bare President Donald Trump‘s skepticism, or even mistrust, of the U.S. intelligence community.
Trump has had a famously rocky relationship with the intelligence community, especially when it does not align with his viewpoint, dating back to before his first term in office. He still rails against the investigation into possible collusion between his 2016 campaign and the Kremlin, and 51 former intelligence officials who inaccurately claimed that the laptop belonging to Hunter Biden had been Russian disinformation.
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He picked two allies in John Ratcliffe and Tulsi Gabbard to lead the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, respectively, both of whom have said it is a part of their mission to root out what they believe has been the politicization of the intelligence community.
While it is not necessarily unusual for a president to question intelligence presented to him, the disagreements have played out in public, with Gabbard in particular getting the brunt of it.
“Intelligence people strive to live in a world as it is, describe the world as it is, where politicians are all about describing the world as they want it to be,” Larry Pfeiffer, a former CIA chief of staff and senior director of the White House Situation Room, told the Associated Press.
“I don’t think we’ve seen another president push back as strong as this guy has,” Pfeiffer added.
Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have been at pains to describe the mission as an overwhelming success. Their anger at how the mission is being characterized has been stoked by the leak of a “preliminary” finding from the Defense Intelligence Agency that indicated the Iranian facilities were only damaged, not destroyed, and that it only set back Iran’s nuclear ambitions by a matter of months.
Hegseth on Thursday took the media to task during a fiery press conference after CNN and the New York Times initially reported the assessment.
“I mean specifically you, the press corps, because you cheer against Trump so hard, it’s like in your DNA and in your blood to cheer against Trump,” Hegseth charged as his boss cheered on from the sidelines.
The crux of the dispute is over how long it would take Iran to rebuild its nuclear program if it chooses to do so. The DIA analysis, which was preliminary and is still being refined, indicated that it could be months, while Hegseth said Thursday that it would be an “untold number of years.”
“Anyone with … two eyes, some ears, and a brain can recognize that kind of firepower with that specificity at that location and others is going to have a devastating effect,” Hegseth said, but a major unknown is what happened with Iran’s enriched uranium and whether it was in the facilities at the time of the attacks.
Trump called the intelligence “inconclusive” on Wednesday, even though he simultaneously maintained it was “complete obliteration.”
“The intelligence was very inconclusive,” he said from the NATO summit on Wednesday. “The intelligence says we don’t know. It could have been very severe. That’s what the intelligence says. So I guess that’s correct. But I think we can take the we don’t know — it was very severe. It was obliteration. It was a complete obliteration.”
In order to further strengthen their case, the White House sent out a statement from the Atomic Energy Commission of Israel that said the U.S. strikes “had set back Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons for many years to come,” and pointed to comments from Iran’s own foreign ministry.
Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters that while the strikes went as planned, it is the intelligence community, not the military, that conducts battle damage assessments.
“A point that I want to make here, the joint force does not do [battle damage assessment]. By design, we don’t grade our own homework,” Caine said Thursday. “The intelligence community does.”
Caine said the operation had origins dating back 15 years to when it tasked officers to track the Iranian project in the mountainous area near the city of Qom. The Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs hit exactly where the United States wanted them to, down the ventilation shafts, at the right speed for their desired effect.
The U.S. carried out its bombings of three Iranian nuclear sites — Isfahan, Natanz, and Fordow — over the weekend using B-2 bombers from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, which dropped the GBU-57 MOP bombs. The U.S. military had never operationally used the 30,000-pound bomb, which is designed to penetrate hardened facilities.
The Fordow facility is buried underground beneath a mountain, making it very difficult for it to be targeted. Israel wanted the U.S. to get involved in the conflict to target Fordow in particular because it does not possess the MOPs.
“All of the evidence of what was just bombed by 12 30,000-pound bombs is buried under a mountain,” Hegseth said Wednesday, adding, “If you want to make an assessment on what happened at Fordow, you better get a big shovel and go really deep because Iran’s nuclear program is obliterated.”
Gabbard said Wednesday that “new intelligence” has led her to the assessment that “Iran’s nuclear facilities have been destroyed,” but she did not specify what it was that led her to that conclusion.
Neither the White House, Defense Department, ODNI, nor CIA has provided details as to what changed from the DIA’s initial assessment to the position Trump, Hegseth, Gabbard, and Ratcliffe have now shared.
Gabbard has reportedly been on the outside of the president’s inner circle over the last couple of weeks regarding the Israel-Iran war and possible U.S. involvement. She was not at a meeting with the president’s national security team on June 8 at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland, to discuss tensions between Israel and Iran.
Around the time of that Camp David meeting, Gabbard posted a video on social media warning that “political elite and warmongers” are “carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers,” and she said the world is “on the brink of nuclear annihilation.”
Trump reportedly expressed his disapproval of the video to her directly, according to Politico.
She told lawmakers in March that the intelligence community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon, and Supreme Leader [Ali] Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003,” though she also noted that Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile “is at its highest levels and is unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons.”
Trump, when asked about the intelligence community’s assessment a day before the U.S. operation, said, “Well then, my intelligence community is wrong.”
“I don’t care what she said,” Trump said in a separate moment when questioned about her March testimony.
Gabbard insisted that they were on the same page following Trump’s remarks and blamed the media for portraying her comments as different from the president’s assessment.
“There’s no question that when the U.S. president makes a statement that our intelligence assessments are wrong and doesn’t believe our own intelligence, that creates a very dangerous moment,” former CIA Director Leon Panetta told the I Paper.
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“It creates a real problem for the president because if he rejects the intelligence he’s receiving, then what will be the basis for the decisions that he makes in the future, and that is a very scary prospect,” Panetta added. “The fundamental question is: Did they make a decision to proceed with developing a weapon? And I think our intelligence indicates that that still was not the case.”
The disagreement over whether Iran was working toward a nuclear weapon is now largely a moot point given the military’s bombings.