New in SpyWeek: Rage Over Iran Intel, Knives Out for Tulsi, Pompeo Hit Plot

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SecDef Hegseth raged against journalists for reporting (accurately) on the DIA’s initial bombing assessment and questions about uranium stocks escaping Iran’s Fordo plant. (Andrew Harnik photo/Getty Images via AFP)

TOTALLY OBLITERATED: President Trump and his administration spent the week rebutting a preliminary U.S. intelligence report that undermined his claim that the airstrikes he ordered “totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear facilities. A classified Defense Intelligence Agency “Battle Damage Assessment,” issued a day after the strike, stated that the dozen bunker-buster bombs dropped by U.S. B-2 bombers failed to destroy the core components of the country’s nuclear program and likely only set it back by months. On Wednesday, CIA Director John Ratcliffe issued a statement saying that “new intelligence” from a “historically reliable and accurate source/method” showed the sites had been “severely damaged.” DNI Tulsi Gabbard went further, saying in a post on X that the new intelligence confirmed the sites had been “destroyed.” The embattled national intelligence chief was notably not present at a Thursday Senate briefing delivered by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Ratcliffe and Dan Caine, during which the JCS chairman said “the U.S. began highly classified planning to destroy Iran’s Fordo nuclear complex in 2009, virtually as soon as the Iranians began to build it,” according to the Wall Street Journal. The FBI has launched an investigation to find out who leaked what the DIA called “a preliminary, low-confidence assessment—not a final conclusion.” The knives are out, meanwhile, for the ODNI, with no less than Tom Cotton, R-Ark, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, proposing to slash the staff of the office by more than half, from 1600 to 650, NBC reported Friday.  (See also our Michael Isikoff’s interview on this subject with Gregory Treverton, former chair of the National Intelligence Council. )

EYES ON THE GROUND: In a flash of frustration over the DIA report, President Trump may have revealed a classified detail: that Israel (or someone) had personnel on the ground confirming the results of a strike inside Iran.