Classified intelligence about the damage to Iran’s nuclear programme from US strikes was at the centre of a political tempest Wednesday as spy chiefs pushed out new assessments and US president Donald Trump continued to defend his assertion that Iran’s key facilities had been “obliterated.”
The CIA director, John Ratcliffe, said the strikes had “severely damaged” Iran’s nuclear programme, and the administration suggested that the initial report, by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), was based on preliminary assessments and was already outdated.
The damage was also being assessed by other US spy agencies. No information that has become public from those assessments has supported Mr Trump’s description of the level of destruction from the US attack, though they all confirmed that the damage had been substantial.
The DIA report was based on information from little more than 24 hours after the American attacks on three of Iran’s nuclear sites.
It described the level of damage as ranging from moderate to severe, according to people briefed on or familiar with its contents.
The report said that if the DIA’s assumption that Fordow, the deepest underground of the sites, sustained a moderate level of damage is correct, then the facility would be inoperable and Iran would not try to rebuild its enrichment capabilities there, one of those people said. If the assumption proved incorrect, the report said, Iran could build a quick version of a nuclear weapon in months.
The report assessed that overall the nuclear programme had been delayed by months, according to two people briefed on its contents. But the report’s conclusion said there was “low confidence” in that finding, reflecting the preliminary nature of the assessment and the variables and uncertainty that intelligence agencies have always wrestled with in predicting Iranian nuclear advances.
CNN and other news organisations also reported the DIA’s findings that the Iranian nuclear programme had been set back by only several months.
The CIA offered a different assessment on Wednesday, with Ratcliffe stating it had collected new material on the state of Iran’s nuclear programme and the sites American bombers struck.
“This includes new intelligence from a historically reliable and accurate source/method that several key Iranian nuclear facilities were destroyed and would have to be rebuilt over the course of years,” Ratcliffe said in a statement.
The National Security Agency, which focuses on intercepted phone and internet communications, has been examining what Iranians have been saying about the strikes and the fate of their uranium stockpiles. And officials said the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which studies satellite imagery, has been looking at movements around the nuclear sites in the days before the American strikes.
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, posted on social media about new intelligence that showed that it would take years if Iran chose to rebuild the three sites the US attack hit.
Officials said her comment was also based on new US intelligence collected since the DIA report was written on Sunday. The new intelligence relates to the existing facilities hit by the US strikes, not whether Iran could use other secret facilities to advance its work on nuclear weapon capability.
Battles over the conclusions of intelligence agencies have been at the centre of American foreign policy controversies for more than two decades – from warnings about al-Qaeda before the September 11th attacks, to intelligence about Iraq’s weapons programmes that the Bush administration used to justify the 2003 invasion but was later debunked, to the extent that the Chinese government was responsible for the spread of the coronavirus.
Defense secretary Pete Hegseth and Gen Dan Caine, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were scheduled to hold an early morning news conference Thursday.
The Senate was also set to hear from intelligence officials on Thursday, but the administration decided that secretary of state Marco Rubio, who is also the interim national security adviser, and Hegseth would deliver the briefing. Administration officials agreed Ratcliffe would attend the programme after senators privately expressed concern that over the absence of the intelligence officials at the briefing, according to a person familiar with plans for the briefing.
At a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Wednesday, Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the committee’s top Democrat, said he hoped cabinet officials could address discrepancies between Trump’s claims and the fact that “the intelligence may not be as rosy”.
“This repeated pattern of manipulating or shading intelligence to support a political narrative is deeply alarming,” Warner said. “We’ve seen where this road leads.”
Trump’s angry responses to the news reports, given during a news conference at a Nato summit in the Netherlands, centred on just how much damage the attacks had caused at two of the nuclear sites, at Natanz and Fordow, which is buried under a mountain and secured by hundreds of feet of concrete, as well as a separate cruise missile attack at a site at Isfahan.
The DIA report has become a flashpoint in the public discussion.
Much of the controversy was generated by Trump’s choice of words within hours of the strikes, as B-2 pilots were still returning to their base in Missouri. He said the Iranian nuclear sites that the United States hit had been “totally obliterated” – an assessment that no intelligence official has directly echoed.
Yet the damage accrued by the three sites is just one part of a bigger question about just how much the US attack and Israel’s nearly two-week war has crippled all aspects of Iran’s nuclear programme. Israel killed Iranian nuclear scientists, wiped out military officials and bombed enrichment facilities before the US military sent in its bombers.
On Wednesday, officials who have read the report differed in their accounts of how much the DIA report, which remains classified, discussed the Iranian stockpile of uranium.
The International Atomic Energy Agency, which before the war had monitored Iran’s nuclear sites, had previously indicated that the material had been moved before the US strikes.
Officials who have read the report also differed over its description of the precise details of the damage to Fordow and whether the strike had damaged or collapsed entrance tunnels, ventilation shafts or other access points.
As Trump gave a blustery defence of his comments that US strikes had “obliterated” the Iranian nuclear sites, Rubio on Wednesday gave a more detailed analysis of why he believed that US and Israeli attacks had dealt a significant blow to Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
Speaking at the Nato summit, he centred his argument on the belief that the “conversion facility” in Isfahan – which is key to converting nuclear fuel into the form needed to produce a nuclear weapon – had been destroyed. The facility is where enriched uranium gas has been converted into solid materials, and ultimately a metal that can be used to fabricate a nuclear bomb or a warhead.
International inspectors and nuclear experts agree that the extensive damage to the conversion facility created a key bottleneck in the weapons-making process, and that rebuilding it would likely take years. But that assumes, of course, that Iran had not built another conversion plant in secret, as part of an insurance policy against the destruction of its “declared” facilities, which were inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Despite the new information, the debate over the state of the Iranian programme is likely to intensify.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
