BBC News, Washington DC
The head of the CIA has said US strikes “severely damaged” Iran’s nuclear facilities and set them back years, diverging from a leaked intelligence report that angered President Donald Trump by downplaying the raid’s impact.
John Ratcliffe, the US spy agency’s director, said key sites had been destroyed, though he stopped short of declaring that Iran’s nuclear programme had been eliminated outright.
It comes a day after a leaked preliminary assessment from a Pentagon intelligence agency suggested core components of Iran’s nuclear programme remained intact after the US bombings.
Trump again maintained the raid had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear facilities.
The Republican president took to social media on Wednesday to post that the “fake news” media had “lied and totally misrepresented the facts, none of which they had”.
He said US Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth and other military officials would hold an “interesting and irrefutable” news conference on Thursday at the Pentagon “in order to fight for the Dignity of our Great American Pilots”.
It came as Israel and Iran seemed for a second day to be honouring a fragile ceasefire that Trump helped negotiate this week on the 12th day of the war.
Speaking at The Hague, where he attended a Nato summit on Wednesday, Trump said of the strikes: “It was very severe. It was obliteration.”
He also said he would probably seek a commitment from Iran to end its nuclear ambitions at talks next week. Iran has not acknowledged any such negotiations.
But US Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff told US network NBC there has been direct and indirect communication between the countries.
The statement from Ratcliffe, who was appointed by Trump, said the CIA’s information included “new intelligence from an historically reliable and accurate source/method that several key Iranian nuclear facilities were destroyed and would have to be rebuilt over the course of years”.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has also come out in support of Trump’s assessment on the damage to Iranian nuclear facilities.
“If the Iranians chose to rebuild, they would have to rebuild all three facilities (Natanz, Fordo, Esfahan) entirely, which would likely take years to do,” she wrote on X.
The US operation involved 125 military aircraft, targeting the three main Iranian nuclear facilities on Saturday.
New satellite images show six craters clustered around two entry points at Fordo, with similar craters spotted at Isfahan – but it is unclear if the nuclear facilities located deep underground were wiped out.
A report from the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency was leaked to US media on Tuesday, estimating that the US bombing had set back Iran’s nuclear programme “only a few months”.
The US defence secretary said that assessment was made with “low confidence”.
Officials familiar with the evaluation cautioned it was an early assessment that could change as more information emerges. The US has 18 intelligence agencies, which sometimes produce conflicting reports based on their mission and area of expertise.
UN nuclear watchdog chief Rafael Grossi said on Wednesday that there was a chance Tehran had moved much of its highly enriched uranium elsewhere as it came under attack.
But Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei told Al Jazeera on Wednesday: “Our nuclear installations have been badly damaged, that’s for sure.” He did not elaborate.
A report by the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission said the strike on Fordo “destroyed the site’s critical infrastructure”.
The damage across all the sites, the report said, has pushed Iran’s timeline for nuclear weapons back by “many years”.
Yet Mehdi Mohammadi, an adviser to the chairman of the Iranian parliament, said shortly after the US strikes that “no irreversible damage was sustained” at Fordo.
Iran has long maintained that its nuclear programme is peaceful. US intelligence agencies have previously said Tehran was not actively building atomic weapons.
