The top-secret Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) assessment that claimed Iran’s nuclear sites suffered only moderate damage likely relied on faulty information from deceitful Iranian sources, according to several former U.S. intelligence officers, one of whom described the document as so unreliable “you can wipe your ass with it.”
The classified DIA report ignited a media firestorm in the days after President Donald Trump authorized precision strikes on Iran’s top three nuclear sites. The findings were leaked to CNN and the New York Times, which presented them as bombshell evidence that the U.S. bombing run only set back Tehran’s nuclear ambitions by several months.
The U.S. intelligence community deemed that initial assessment “low-confidence,” a fact CNN omitted from its original piece, and based it solely on satellite imagery and intercepted communications—known as signals intelligence, or SIGINT—from Iranian officials. Shortly after the assessment leaked, Axios reported that communications intercepted by Israel “suggest Iranian military officials have been giving false situation reports to the country’s political leadership—downplaying the extent of the damage.” Such communications likely made their way into the DIA report, according to three former U.S. intelligence operatives, a current U.S. official, and other veteran national security insiders who spoke to the Washington Free Beacon both on and off the record. Some of them referred to the DIA as the “discount intelligence agency.”
“It’s basically messaging by the [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps], messaging by Tehran,” said Michael Pregent, a former intelligence officer with U.S. Central Command who operated in the Middle East for nearly 30 years. “DIA is taking a SIGINT report from the National Security Agency … and putting together an assessment to leak. I know it’s messaging, the Iranians know it’s messaging, and for some reason, NSA believes it’s actual f—ing intelligence.”
A current U.S. official familiar with the ongoing damage assessment process said that the DIA’s findings—as well as “the partisan hit job published by CNN”—have been “completely debunked” over the past 24 hours, including by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
“It has now been established by the IAEA that Iran’s nuclear program suffered ‘enormous damage’ and the ‘centrifuges … are completely destroyed,’” the official told the Free Beacon. “The military operation carried out by the United States was a huge success and we are grateful to our troops who valiantly carried out the president’s mission.”
In addition to the IAEA, Central Intelligence Agency director John Ratcliffe announced that the CIA learned 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.”
Another former American intelligence officer characterized the DIA’s findings as “embarrassing” and said the analysts responsible for assembling the report failed to “understand what they were looking at,” particularly regarding Fordow, the mountain bunker buried under more than 300 feet of concrete.
“You’re not going to see a huge hole down to Hell,” said the former intelligence officer, speaking only on background to discuss U.S. intelligence-gathering methods. “You’re not going to see that they dropped these bombs in specific locations so that they would detonate well underground, because it was such a deeply buried facility and under so much concrete.”
“It’s clear that those people had no idea what they were talking about, and I agree with the fact that undoubtedly all these [Iranians] knew their phones were being monitored by multiple countries and acted accordingly,” the former operative told the Free Beacon. “So, nothing that they said should have been used as any sort of gospel.”
The former intelligence officer said that the DIA’s categorization of its own assessment renders it effectively useless.
“The fact that the DIA’s assessment was deemed ‘low-confidence’ means that you can wipe your ass with it,” the source added. “You probably get more information from a Free Beacon article.”
A third former U.S. official who worked primarily on the Iran portfolio agreed that the initial DIA report included “Iranians repeating propaganda to each other, as they have done throughout the war and preceding preparations.”
Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) told reporters the contested DIA report “was preliminary” and contained “numerous intelligence gaps” following a Thursday briefing with senior Trump administration officials on Capitol Hill.
Michael Rubin, a former Pentagon adviser, noted that DIA analysts’ reliance on intercepted communications has been a longstanding concern.
“There’s a long pattern within the DIA in which analysts listen so much to their targets that they actually start to rationalize, if not believe them,” said Rubin, now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “This is why so many DIA Middle East analysts become outspoken conspiracy theorists or advocates for normalizing ties with groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. Too much Iran leads to becoming analytically—if not morally—unhinged.”
The leak itself, Rubin said, likely came from a DIA agent who “wanted to write the first draft of history because he or she knew the assessment would likely be challenged.”
For Simone Ledeen, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East, the situation raises concerns about the American intelligence community and its inherent biases.
“At a fundamental level, a lot of our analytic corps needs to be completely destroyed and rebuilt,” Ledeen told the Free Beacon. “A lot of these people are coming from you know which schools, so they’re totally indoctrinated and they don’t know what they’re talking about because they’re not properly educated anyway.”
A senior DIA official told the Free Beacon that the assessment was not meant for public consumption and that the agency will work to find whomever leaked it to the press.
“This is a preliminary, low-confidence assessment—not a final conclusion—and will continue to be refined as additional intelligence becomes available,” the official said. “We have still not been able to review the physical sites themselves, which will give us the best indication. We are working with the FBI and other authorities to investigate the unauthorized disclosure of classified information.”
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