Classified intelligence about the damage to Iran’s nuclear program from U.S. strikes was at the center of a political tempest on Wednesday as spy chiefs pushed out new assessments and President Trump continued to defend his assertion that Iran’s key facilities had been “obliterated.”
The C.I.A. director, John Ratcliffe, said the strikes had “severely damaged” Iran’s nuclear program, and the administration suggested that the initial report, by the Defense Intelligence Agency, was based on preliminary assessments and was already outdated.
The damage was also being assessed by other U.S. spy agencies. No information that has become public from those assessments has supported Mr. Trump’s description of the level of destruction from the U.S. attack, though they all confirmed that the damage had been substantial.
The D.I.A. report was based on information from little more than 24 hours after the American attacks on three of Iran’s nuclear sites.
It described the level of damage as ranging from moderate to severe, according to people briefed on or familiar with its contents.
The report said that if the D.I.A.’s assumption that Fordo, the deepest underground of the sites, sustained a moderate level of damage is correct, then the facility would be inoperable and Iran would not try to rebuild its enrichment capabilities there, one of those people said. If the assumption proved incorrect, the report said, Iran could build a quick version of a nuclear weapon in months.
The report assessed that overall the nuclear program had been delayed by months, according to two people briefed on its contents. But the report’s conclusion said there was “low confidence” in that finding, reflecting the preliminary nature of the assessment and the variables and uncertainty that intelligence agencies have always wrestled with in predicting Iranian nuclear advances.
CNN and other news organizations also reported the D.I.A.’s findings that the Iranian nuclear program had been set back by only several months.
The C.I.A. offered a different assessment on Wednesday, with Mr. Ratcliffe stating it had collected new material on the state of Iran’s nuclear program and the sites American bombers struck.
“This includes new intelligence from a 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,” Mr. Ratcliffe said in a statement.
The National Security Agency, which focuses on intercepted phone and internet communications, has been examining what Iranians have been saying about the strikes and the fate of their uranium stockpiles. And officials said the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which studies satellite imagery, has been looking at movements around the nuclear sites in the days before the American strikes.
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, posted on social media about new intelligence that showed that it would take years if Iran chose to rebuild the three sites the American attack hit.
Officials said her comment was also based on new U.S. intelligence collected since the D.I.A. report was written Sunday. The new intelligence relates to the existing facilities hit by the U.S. strikes, not whether Iran could use other secret facilities to advance its work on nuclear weapon capability.
Battles over the conclusions of intelligence agencies have been at the center of American foreign policy controversies for more than two decades — from warnings about Al Qaeda before the Sept. 11 attacks, to intelligence about Iraq’s weapons programs that the Bush administration used to justify the 2003 invasion but was later debunked, to the extent that the Chinese government was responsible for the spread of the coronavirus.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are scheduled to hold an early morning news conference on Thursday.
The Senate was also set to hear from intelligence officials on Thursday, but the administration decided that Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is also the interim national security adviser, and Mr. Hegseth would deliver the briefing. Administration officials agreed Mr. Ratcliffe would attend the program after senators privately expressed concern that over the absence of the intelligence officials at the briefing, according to a person familiar with plans for the briefing.
At a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Wednesday, Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the committee’s top Democrat, said he hoped cabinet officials could address discrepancies between Mr. Trump’s claims and the fact that “the intelligence may not be as rosy.”
“This repeated pattern of manipulating or shading intelligence to support a political narrative is deeply alarming,” Mr. Warner said. “We’ve seen where this road leads.”
Mr. Trump’s angry responses to the news reports, given during a news conference at a NATO summit in the Netherlands, centered on just how much damage the attacks had caused at two of the nuclear sites, at Natanz and Fordo, which is buried under a mountain and secured by hundreds of feet of concrete, as well as a separate cruise missile attack at a site at Isfahan.
The D.I.A. report has become a flashpoint in the public discussion.
Much of the controversy was generated by Mr. Trump’s choice of words within hours of the strikes, as B-2 pilots were still returning to their base in Missouri. He said the Iranian nuclear sites that the United States hit had been “totally obliterated” — an assessment that no intelligence official has directly echoed.
Yet the damage accrued by the three sites is just one part of a bigger question about just how much the U.S. attack and Israel’s nearly two-week war has crippled all aspects of Iran’s nuclear program. Israel killed Iranian nuclear scientists, wiped out military officials and bombed enrichment facilities before the U.S. military sent in its bombers.
Numerous intelligence agencies in the United States, Israel and Europe are now racing to determine exactly how much the Iranian program has been damaged, what remains, and what Iran will choose to do now — abandon the program or become even more determined to get the bomb, something Mr. Trump voiced confidence it won’t do.
Iran has other nuclear sites and officials said other information, including comments from the I.A.E.A., indicates that the Iranians moved much of the stock of enriched uranium. Should Iran decide to move quickly to get a bomb, it is unlikely to use the facilities struck in the American attack but probably has much of the raw materials and know-how needed to continue, officials said.
In a letter to The New York Times threatening to sue for libel over its article on Tuesday on the D.I.A. assessment, a personal lawyer for Mr. Trump took issue with The Times’s report that classified findings indicate that the U.S. attack sealed off the entrances to two of the facilities but did not collapse their underground buildings. The letter also took issue with reporting that said the D.I.A. report said much of Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium had been moved.
On Wednesday, officials who have read the report differed in their accounts of how much the D.I.A. report, which remains classified, discussed the Iranian stockpile of uranium.
The I.A.E.A, which before the war had monitored Iran’s nuclear sites, had previously indicated that the material had been moved before the U.S. strikes.
Officials who have read the report also differed over its description of the precise details of the damage to Fordo and whether the strike had damaged or collapsed entrance tunnels, ventilation shafts or other access points.
As Mr. Trump gave a blustery defense of his comments that American strikes had “obliterated” the Iranian nuclear sites, Mr. Rubio on Wednesday gave a more detailed analysis of why he believed that American and Israeli attacks had dealt a significant blow to Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
Speaking at the NATO summit, he centered his argument on the belief that the “conversion facility” in Isfahan — which is key to converting nuclear fuel into the form needed to produce a nuclear weapon — had been destroyed. The facility is where enriched uranium gas has been converted into solid materials, and ultimately a metal that can be used to fabricate a nuclear bomb or a warhead.
The International Atomic Energy Agency reported that one of Israel’s attacks on Isfahan hit “the enriched uranium metal processing facility, which was under construction,” and the American strikes also targeted the Isfahan facility.
“You can’t do a nuclear weapon without a conversion facility,” Mr. Rubio said. “We can’t even find where it is, where it used to be on the map,” he added, speaking of the conversion facility. “The whole thing is blackened out. It’s gone. It’s wiped out.”
Mr. Rubio also railed against the leaks of the D.I.A. report by “staffers” and said the F.B.I. had been asked to investigate.
International inspectors and nuclear experts agree that the extensive damage to the conversion facility created a key bottleneck in the weapons-making process, and that rebuilding it would likely take years. But that assumes, of course, that Iran had not built another conversion plant in secret, as part of an insurance policy against the destruction of its “declared” facilities, which were inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Despite the new information, the debate over the state of the Iranian program is likely to intensify.
Raphael Miron, a former deputy head of Israel’s National Security Council who was responsible for issues related to the Iranian nuclear weapons project, said both the American strikes and the longer Israeli campaign left questions about the state of the Iranian program.
“Because the prime minister said it was an existential threat, we must have answers with very high certainty to these questions,” Mr. Miron said, referring to the justification for attacking Iran’s nuclear sites offered by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.
“The corrective steps, this war that took place in recent days, was meant to bring the horses back to the stable, to neutralize the very dangerous situation we were in,” Mr. Miron said. “The question is whether this move succeeded. In my opinion, we don’t have enough information to give a positive answer to that question, with sufficient level of confidence.”
Reporting was contributed by William J. Broad from New York, Ronen Bergman from Chicago, Eric Schmitt and Helene Cooper from Washington and David E. Sanger in The Hague.
Julian E. Barnes covers the U.S. intelligence agencies and international security matters for The Times. He has written about security issues for more than two decades.
Mark Mazzetti is an investigative reporter based in Washington, D.C., focusing on national security, intelligence, and foreign affairs. He has written a book about the C.I.A.
Maggie Haberman is a White House correspondent for The Times, reporting on President Trump.
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