CIA Director John Ratcliffe claimed Iran’s nuclear program was “severely damaged” by recent U.S. airstrikes after reports from CNN and The New York Times suggested that the targeted hits weren’t as successful as President Donald Trump has maintained.
Ratcliffe pointed to what he described as a “body of credible intelligence,” which showed that “several key Iranian nuclear facilities were destroyed and would have to be rebuilt over the course of years.”
His statement comes as the White House has disputed media reports, including one from CNN, which cited an assessment by the Pentagon’s intelligence arm, and which stated that the airstrikes had “likely only set [Iran’s nuclear program] back by months.”
The CNN report also noted that the strikes failed to “destroy the core components of the country’s nuclear program,” while another report from the Times, which referred to the same intelligence assessment, said that they did not “collapse … underground buildings” which are a key part of the nuclear sites.
The Pentagon intelligence assessment reportedly noted that the sites had suffered “moderate to severe damage,” and was a preliminary review. A final conclusion about the battle damage assessment is still to come, General Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Sunday.
Trump has repeatedly alleged that the U.S. “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program when it launched airstrikes on three nuclear facilities this past weekend, even as other officials, like Caine, have been more circumspect about speaking on the extent of the damage.
Trump also lashed out at both CNN and the Times for their reporting on this issue, calling journalists “scum” and describing them as “fake news.”
“This alleged ‘assessment’ is flat-out wrong and was classified as ‘top secret’ but was still leaked to CNN by an anonymous, low-level loser in the intelligence community,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement earlier this week.
Trump noted in a Truth Social post on Wednesday that he’ll be holding a press conference alongside Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to address the subject on Thursday.
“The Fake News (Times and CNN) lied and totally misrepresented the Facts, none of which they had (because it was too soon, there were no Facts out there yet!). The News Conference will prove both interesting and irrefutable,” he wrote on Truth Social.
