President Trump doubled down Wednesday on the success of the U.S. strikes of three key nuclear sites in Iran after a leaked Defense Intelligence Agency report said the U.S. assault in the Islamic Republic may not have been as devastating as initially thought.
Mr. Trump told reporters during his trip to the NATO summit at The Hague that the U.S. strike in Iran set its nuclear program back “decades.”
“We hear it was obliteration. It was a virtual obliteration,” Mr. Trump told reporters while meeting with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. “If you look at the before and the after picture, everything above [ground] is burned black, the trees, everything.”
He said there also was fire underground from the blasts.
Mr. Trump noted, “And there’s one building, but that’s a building that sunk substantially into the granite, that the fire goes right over. I believe it was total obliteration.”
Mr. Hegseth, who pointed out the report was top secret, said the Department of Defense is doing a leak investigation with the FBI to determine who passed along the information to CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post and several other outlets.
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The leaked Defense Intelligence Agency report, which assessed the strikes, said the assault may have only set Iran’s nuclear weapons program back by a few months. The assessment also reportedly said that some of Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile was moved before the strikes.
Mr. Trump and his team said otherwise.
“I believe they didn’t have a chance to get anything out because we acted fast,” the president said. “This was a devastating attack. It knocked them for a loop. If it didn’t, they [Iranian leaders] wouldn’t have settled. If they had won, and we didn’t take it out, they wouldn’t have settled [for a ceasefire].”
Mr. Hegseth said of the media reports on the intelligence assessment, “CNN and others are trying to spin it to make the president look bad when this was an overwhelming success.” He said the U.S. strike was a “flawless” mission completed by military B-2 pilots who delivered the bombs to their precise targets.
“And given the 30,000 pounds of explosives and capability of those munitions, it was devastation underneath Fordo and the amount of munitions, six per location,” he said. “Any assessment that tells you it was something otherwise is speculating with other motives, and we know that because when you actually look at the report, by the way, it was a top secret report, it was preliminary, it was low confidence.”
Mr. Rubio said the leaked intelligence report is part of a “game” that leakers play.
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“They read it, and then they go out and characterize it the way they want it characterized,” he said. “Here’s a fact — the conversion facility, which you can’t do a nuclear weapon without a conversion facility, we can’t even find where it is, where it used to be on the map.”
Israeli intelligence services say U.S. and Israeli strikes caused “very significant” damage to Iran’s nuclear sites, with some officials puzzled by the leaked U.S. intelligence report that is saying otherwise.
However, Israel has yet to put out a final report on how much the strike in Iran set back Iran’s nuclear program.
