Trump’s New Intelligence Problem

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, June 25, 2025

 

No one at the Pentagon who compiled the Defense Intelligence Agency’s (DIA) preliminary, “low confidence” assessment of the battle damage done by the United States to Iran’s nuclear facilities intended that analysis as a political document. Those who leaked this highly classified review almost certainly did, though. And their intention was likely to embarrass the administration in which they serve.

 

CNN was first to report on the document, which concluded in so many words that the strikes were a failure. “One of the people said the centrifuges are largely ‘intact,’” the report read. “Another source said that the intelligence assessed enriched uranium was moved out of the sites prior to the US strikes.” According to one unnamed figure who summarized the DIA’s findings, the strikes set Iran’s nuclear program “back maybe a few months, tops.”

 

The report’s intelligence should not be gainsaid by lay observers but taken as one raw product that will soon be synthesized with the products produced by America’s 17 other intelligence agencies. Instead, opportunistic opponents of this president and these strikes seized on the report to claim that Operation Midnight Hammer was a disaster.

 

“He claims he destroyed ‘all nuclear facilities and capability,’” Democratic Representative Pat Ryan wrote. Yet, “his team knows they can’t back up his bluster and BS,” which is why the administration abruptly canceled a classified House briefing on the strikes late yesterday — a decision that was conspicuously timed with the release of CNN’s report. Representative Lloyd Doggett agreed. CNN’s dispatch “indicates Trump’s unconstitutional military strikes didn’t accomplish what he so bullishly claims,” he wrote. “Trump’s brashness is only matched by weakness [and] incompetence.” The pro-retrenchment right also latched onto the report, which appeared to ratify their skepticism toward Trump’s air strikes. “The deep state remains,” radio host Andrew Wilkow snarled. “Trump must clean house. Someone needs to go to jail.”

 

Wilkow has a point, albeit not the one he probably thinks he is making.

 

The DIA’s preliminary analysis conflicts with several other early battle damage assessments. The Israelis, who have a sophisticated intelligence network throughout Iran and human sources on the ground, believe the strikes produced “extremely severe damage and destruction” at Iran’s nuclear sites and support facilities. “Nobody is disappointed here,” one Israeli official told Axios’s Barak Ravid. “We doubt that these facilities can be activated any time in the near future,” another official remarked.

 

To some extent, the Israeli outlook changes depending on the person to whom you’re speaking. One unnamed Israeli “source” told ABC News the outcome at the Fordow enrichment plant, for example, was “really not good.” But, in that same report, another “source with knowledge of the Israeli intelligence assessment” said the facility had been “damaged beyond repair.”

 

That’s what the International Atomic Energy Agency determined as well. “I think the Iranian nuclear program has been set back significantly, significantly,” IAEA director general Rafael Grossi told Fox News. There is a “night and day” difference between the Iran that existed on June 13 — a “nuclear Iran,” Grossi said — “and one now.”

 

All this comports with a comprehensive overview of the battle damage by the Institute for Science and International Security. That report, composed by Iran nuclear program expert David Albright and his colleagues, provides a detailed look at the indications provided by open-source intelligence and satellite imagery. It concludes that the strikes at sites like Fordow, Isfahan, and Natanz, as well as sites that manufacture the program’s components, “have effectively destroyed Iran’s centrifuge enrichment program.”

 

The strikes on Fordow were particularly effective, according to the ISIS analysis:

 

Our overlay indicates that the bombs precisely struck an unknown surface service structure located directly above the south end of the centrifuge cascade hall. This service structure was only visible for a short time in late 2009 during its installation, just prior to being earth covered to conceal its presence. Such point targeting not only completely destroyed that surface structure but was likely intended to focus at depth on the south end of centrifuge cascade hall, which, once breached, would use the hall’s long side walls to channel the blast wave through the entire length of centrifuge cascade hall completely destroying all of the installed and otherwise operational centrifuges.

 

Interestingly, the bomb blast waves that would have been generated down the two halls from these two points of attack run perpendicular to one another, further increasing the likelihood of maximum damage and destruction.

 

“It will be a long time before Iran comes anywhere near the capability it had before the attack,” that report determined. If we were to take the Iranian regime’s pronouncements at face value, this is Tehran’s conclusion as well. The Iranian foreign ministry said the country’s nuclear facilities had been “badly damaged” by the strikes.

 

It remains too early to expect a comprehensive battle damage assessment, much less one that has been made available to the public. But the DIA’s low-confidence review has been called into doubt not just by other competing analyses but common sense. CNN’s report, for example, notes that the strikes at Iran’s three biggest nuclear facilities were “largely restricted to aboveground structures,” which is true in the sense that the majority of the American bombs dropped on Iran were not Massive Ordnance Penetrators. But it was always unlikely that the 14 deep penetrating bombs stacked one atop the other, each containing enough high explosive to generate a yield equivalent to roughly four tons of TNT, would be painlessly absorbed by their targets.

 

We can deduce that the individuals who leaked the DIA assessment did so not to contribute to the sum of human knowledge but to influence political events in the United States and, specifically, to box in the president. From the outset of Israel’s campaign against Iran, Trump has had to swat down what he described as faulty analysis from his own director of national intelligence and sources inside the administration, all of which seemed designed to derail Trump’s imminent order to hit Iranian nuclear targets.

 

The president should be able to recognize the problem he now faces. He’s seen it all before. Throughout the interregnum Trump spent in the political wilderness, he fumed over his belief that the intelligence community had acted against him at every turn. He surrounded himself with figures who confirmed his instincts, some of whom the president took with him into his second term. The intelligence establishment is now staffed at its highest levels by people who believe that intelligence under Trump 1.0 did not have the president’s interests at heart. But the new establishment seems to have succumbed to a similar delusion — that it should guide the country’s policy in its own preferred direction, even if that direction conflicts with the commander in chief’s judgment.

 

Because these are Trump’s creations, he might be less inclined to reimpose discipline on the runaway intelligence officials in his midst lest he tacitly admit his own judgmental errors. But the problem is real, and it will continue to frustrate this administration until it is dealt with. Wilkow is right. The “deep state” abides. It’s a different deep state now — a MAGA-flavored version — but it is just as convinced of its own competence and everyone else’s foolishness, Trump included.