CIA Director John Ratcliffe said Wednesday credible intelligence indicated that Iran’s nuclear program was “severely damaged” in recent U.S. airstrikes and that several key sites were “destroyed.”
A Defense Intelligence Agency initial assessment leaked on Tuesday found that the U.S. bombing of three Iranian nuclear sites may have set back the country’s nuclear program by only several months, a more limited impact than President Donald Trump stated after the strikes.
The precise damage inflicted on Iran’s nuclear facilities and the viability of its broader program have become politically charged issues, with Trump and his deputies denouncing the leak of the DIA report and the news outlets that reported it. Democratic lawmakers have accused the White House of possibly overstating the effect of the strikes.
Ratcliffe said on social media that the CIA’s findings were based on “credible intelligence” and that they contradicted what he called “illegally sourced public reporting regarding the destruction of key Iranian nuclear facilities.”
Ratcliffe cited 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.”
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, offered a similar assessment earlier in the day.
Arms control experts and former intelligence officials say Iran could revive its nuclear program even without the three nuclear sites that were targeted if it managed to safeguard a sufficient supply of highly enriched uranium and advanced centrifuges.
The head of the United Nations atomic watchdog agency, Rafael Grossi, said Wednesday in Vienna that it was possible Iran still had a stockpile of highly enriched uranium despite a 12-day Israeli air campaign and the U.S. air raids over the weekend. Tehran may have moved the uranium soon after the first bombing raids by Israel, Grossi said.
Before Ratcliffe released his statement, Trump dismissed the DIA assessment as inconclusive and premature and said repeatedly that Iran’s nuclear sites and nuclear program had been “obliterated.”
The DIA labeled its initial assessment as being of “low confidence,” according to three sources with knowledge of the matter.
Intelligence analysts typically present their findings with varying levels of confidence, depending on the quality and credibility of the information available.
The initial DIA assessment was based on findings from Sunday night, about 24 hours after the U.S. bombing raid against three Iranian nuclear facilities, one of the sources said.
A full battle damage assessment is still underway, the report also said, and it will take days to weeks to complete, according to one of the sources.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters at the NATO summit in the Netherlands that the DIA assessment was marked as being of “low confidence” because the evidence of what was bombed “is buried under a mountain, devastated and obliterated.”
NBC News reported Tuesday that the initial assessment found that the strikes had most likely set back Iran’s nuclear program by about three to six months but did not definitively destroy Iran’s nuclear program as Trump has asserted.
Initial intelligence reporting does not indicate that all of Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium has been destroyed or accounted for, and there are still questions about Iran’s advanced centrifuges, which were not found at the nuclear sites bombed by U.S. aircraft, NBC News also reported Tuesday.
The Israeli Atomic Energy Commission said Wednesday that the U.S. bombing had rendered the Fordo underground enrichment site “inoperable.”
“We assess that the American strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, combined with Israeli strikes on other elements of Iran’s military nuclear program, has set back Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons by many years,” the commission said in a statement.
It added that the “achievement can continue indefinitely if Iran does not get access to nuclear material.”
