The Trump administration’s declaration of a crushing blow to Iran’s nuclear program is facing early skepticism from within its own intelligence community. A preliminary assessment by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), first reported by NBC News, suggests that the weekend bombing campaign on Iranian nuclear facilities—heralded by officials as a decisive show of American might—fell short of its strategic goal.
According to three sources briefed on the classified report, the strikes on Iran’s heavily fortified sites at Isfahan, Natanz, and Fordow failed to fully collapse the underground infrastructure shielding Iran’s most sensitive nuclear operations. The damage, analysts say, has set back the Islamic Republic’s nuclear ambitions by no more than three to six months—far from the “obliteration” claimed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and President Donald Trump.
Despite the assessment’s findings, Hegseth struck a defiant tone. “Based on everything we have seen—and I’ve seen it all—our bombing campaign obliterated Iran’s ability to create nuclear weapons,” he told CNBC. He emphasized the use of 14 GBU-57 bunker-buster bombs and over 125 aircraft in the strikes, calling the operation a masterclass in precision warfare. “We hit exactly the right spot at each target,” Hegseth declared, dismissing intelligence officials’ concerns as efforts to undermine the mission and the president.
Hegseth accused media outlets that reported on the internal U.S. assessment of trying “to find a way to spin it for their own political reasons to try to hurt President Trump or our country.”
“They don’t care what the troops think. They don’t are what the world thinks. They want to spin it to try to make him look bad based on a leak,” Hegseth added, noted The Hill.
Hegseth described the assessment as a “preliminary report that’s deemed to be a low assessment. You know what a low assessment means? Low confidence in the data in that report.”
President Trump echoed the message on Truth Social, writing, “The sites were totally destroyed, and everyone knows it.” At a press briefing, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt labeled the intelligence leak “flat-out wrong” and accused anonymous insiders of spreading disinformation to damage the president politically. “Everyone knows what happens when you drop fourteen 30,000-pound bombs perfectly on their targets: total obliteration,” she said.
“If you want to make an assessment of what happened at Fordow, you better get a big shovel and go really deep,” Hegseth said, referring to one of the nuclear facilities targeted by the U.S. “Because Iran’s nuclear program is obliterated…Those that dropped the bombs precisely in the right place know exactly what happened when that exploded. And you know who else knows? Iran.”
The “leak” may be more of an attempt for Democrats to try to gain their footing in the aftermath of Trump’s bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites. Politico wrote that the party has “struggled” to respond, with some calling for Trump’s impeachment while others praised the strike.
