Uproar over leaked intelligence underlines murky view of Iran strikes

As Trump announces new nuclear talks with Tehran, the status of Iran’s program might not be fully known unless inspectors are allowed to visit the sites that were attacked to assess the damage.

A US Air Force B-2 Spirit lands after supporting Operation "Midnight Hammer" at Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri. Picture: AFP.

President Trump has announced that US officials will hold talks next week with Iran on its nuclear program as he doubled down on his claims that military strikes against Iranian nuclear sites crippled Tehran’s ability to pursue a nuclear bomb.

“We’re going to talk to them next week, with Iran,” he said. “We may sign an agreement. I don’t know. To me, I don’t think it’s that necessary.”

On Wednesday (local time) Mr Trump rejected a leaked preliminary intelligence report that assessed the American strike had merely delayed Iran’s efforts for a few months.

The dispute points to a larger problem that is likely to bedevil U.S. intelligence analysis and experts for many months, as they attempt to determine the full extent of damage on the nuclear facilities that were struck.

While there are ample indications that the Iranian program suffered major damage from the B-2 bomber and cruise-missile strikes the U.S. carried out last weekend, the status of Iran’s program might not be fully known unless inspectors are allowed to visit the sites that were attacked and the suspected locations where enriched uranium and nuclear-related equipment might be hidden. Iran maintains that its program is for peaceful purposes.

“Remote battle-damage assessment is always difficult,” said Charles Duelfer, who oversaw United Nations weapons inspections in Iraq and later directed a Central Intelligence Agency assessment after the 2003 U.S. invasion on what happened to Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass-destruction programs. “That’s why people like inspectors on the ground.”

Speaking at a North Atlantic Treaty Organisation summit at The Hague, Trump stood by his initial claims that the Iran program had been “totally obliterated” and called the early findings in a leaked Defense Intelligence Agency report “inconclusive.” The issue is likely to be addressed Thursday morning at a rare Pentagon news conference, which Trump announced in a social-media post.

“We destroyed the nuclear,” Trump said.

The Natanz nuclear enrichment facility in central Iran after US military strikes. Picture: Planet Labs/AFP.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe issued a statement that lent support to Trump’s broad claims without offering details.

“CIA can confirm that a body of credible intelligence indicates that Iran’s Nuclear Program has been severely damaged by the recent, targeted strikes,” Ratcliffe said. “This includes new intelligence from an 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.” Neither the White House nor the CIA addressed the status of stocks of highly enriched uranium that Iran was known to possess and whether they might have been moved before the U.S. attack.

On Sunday, Vice President JD Vance suggested to a television interviewer that Iran still had caches of enriched uranium.

“We are going to work in the coming weeks to ensure that we do something with that fuel and that is one of the things that we’re going to have conversations with the Iranians about,” Vance told ABC News.

Before Israel and the U.S. attacked, Iran was thought to have enough near-weapons-grade material for about 10 nuclear weapons. But Vance also argued that the uranium wouldn’t be useful to Iran because its main known enrichment facilities had been destroyed.

A person familiar with the DIA intelligence report leaked this week said the document itself states in its first paragraph that it is a preliminary assessment based on reporting available just 24 hours after the strike, and that it wasn’t coordinated with other agencies within the intelligence community. It also states that a full damage assessment would require days to weeks to collect the necessary data to make a proper judgment.

A senior DIA official described the report, which was written about 24 hours after the U.S. strikes and based on an early battle-damage assessment of the sites, as “a preliminary, low-confidence assessment – not a final conclusion.”

Former U.S. officials and experts said there were multiple challenges in determining whether any residual Iranian nuclear capabilities remain to pursue the development of nuclear weapons.

One question is the amount of destruction to the Iranian enrichment facilities that were targeted, including the heavily fortified Fordow site that is built inside a mountain.

Another crucial question is whether Iran’s stocks of enriched uranium might have been moved before the U.S. strike or recovered afterward. Still another uncertainty is whether Iran might have a clandestine inventory of centrifuges or nuclear-related equipment at locations that weren’t targeted.

A US Air Force B-2 Spirit takes off to support Operation "Midnight Hammer". Picture: AFP.

If some of Iran’s program survived, Tehran might be more determined than ever to try to produce a nuclear weapon, former officials said.

“The devastating impact of Israeli and U.S. military attacks has most likely heightened Iranian interest in acquiring nuclear weapons and increased the influence of Iranian hard-liners favouring nuclear weaponisation,” said Robert Einhorn, a former senior State Department official who worked on weapons-proliferation issues during the Obama administration.

Among the unanswered questions, Einhorn said, is whether the U.S. and the International Atomic Energy Agency are confident that none of the enriched uranium Iran produced has been moved to secret locations.

The preliminary classified DIA report found that the U.S. military’s strikes only set back Tehran’s nuclear ambitions by a few months, according to people familiar with the matter. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said Wednesday that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was probing the leak of the document to the media.

The disagreement is just the latest to position Trump against the views of some of his own intelligence agencies. In the past, Trump has dismissed consensus determinations from the intelligence community, such as its conclusions that Russia interfered in the 2016 election in a bid to help his campaign.

This time, however, Trump’s dispute is with the low-confidence findings of a spy agency’s initial assessment of a situation that some U.S. officials and independent nuclear-security experts say is difficult to make clear judgments about without more information.

Spy agencies frequently produce raw, low-confidence assessments that are then disseminated across the intelligence community, where other analysts look to corroborate or challenge the findings.

For example, the National Security Agency works to intercept the private communications of foreign targets. To bolster or rebut DIA’s findings, analysts there could be sifting through its surveillance databases to discover whether Iranian officials were discussing the extent of the damage at the nuclear facilities.

But gathering a clearer picture of the extent of the damage to the sites could ultimately prove to be a slow and difficult process. U.S. lawmakers have been seeking intelligence briefings on the outcome of the U.S. and Israeli strikes, but a White House official said the administration is planning to limit how it shares classified intelligence products with Congress in response to the DIA report leak.

Dow Jones