CIA Director: Iran's nuclear plants 'seriously damaged'

2025-06-26 08:00:00, Kosova & Bota CNA

CIA chief John Ratcliffe 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 impact of the attack.

John Ratcliffe said key sites had been destroyed, although he stopped short of declaring that Iran's nuclear program had been completely eliminated.

The statement comes a day after a leaked preliminary assessment by a Pentagon intelligence agency suggested that core components of Iran's nuclear program had remained intact after the US bombing.

Trump insisted again that the attack had "totally destroyed" Iran's nuclear facilities.

The Republican president took to social media on Wednesday to post that the "fake news" media had "completely lied and distorted the facts, which they had none at all."

He said that US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, along with other military officials, would hold an "interesting and irrefutable" press conference on Thursday at the Pentagon "in order to fight for the Dignity of our Great American Pilots."

This came as Israel and Iran appeared to be respecting for the second day in a row a fragile ceasefire that Trump helped negotiate this week, on the 12th day of the war.

Speaking in The Hague, where he attended a NATO summit on Wednesday, Trump said of the attacks: "They were very brutal. It was total devastation."

He also said he would probably seek a commitment from Iran to end its nuclear ambitions in talks next week. Iran has not agreed to any such negotiations.

But the US envoy for the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, told the American network NBC that there has been direct and indirect communication between the two countries.

The statement from Ratcliffe, who was appointed by Trump, said the CIA information included "new intelligence from a historically reliable and accurate source/method, indicating that some of Iran's key nuclear facilities had been destroyed and would need to be rebuilt over several years."

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has also come out in support of Trump's assessment of the damage to Iran's nuclear facilities.

"If the Iranians choose to rebuild, they would have to rebuild all three facilities (Natanz, Fordo, Esfahan) from scratch, which would likely take years," she wrote on the X platform.

The US operation involved 125 military aircraft, which targeted all three main Iranian nuclear facilities on Saturday.

New satellite images show six craters clustered around two entry points at Fordow, with similar craters also spotted in Esfahan — but it remains unclear whether the nuclear facilities located deep underground have been completely destroyed.

A report by the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, released to US media on Tuesday, estimated that US bombing had set back Iran's nuclear program "by only a few months."

The US Secretary of Defense said that assessment was made with "low confidence".

Officials familiar with the assessment cautioned that it was an early assessment that could change as more information emerges. The US has 18 intelligence agencies, which sometimes produce conflicting reports depending on their mission and area of ??expertise.

The head of the UN nuclear watchdog, Rafael Grossi, said on Wednesday that there was a possibility that Tehran had moved most of its highly enriched uranium to another location while it was under attack.

But Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei told Al Jazeera on Wednesday: "Our nuclear facilities have been severely damaged, that's for sure." He did not provide further details.

A report by the Israel Atomic Energy Commission said the attack on the Fordo facility "destroyed its critical infrastructure."

According to the report, the damage to all facilities has pushed back Iran's deadline for developing nuclear weapons by "many years."

However, Mehdi Mohammadi, an advisor to the speaker of the Iranian parliament, stated shortly after the US attacks that "no irreversible damage has been caused" to Fordow.

Iran has long maintained that its nuclear program is peaceful. US intelligence agencies have previously stated that Tehran was not actively building nuclear weapons./ CNA