CIA says it has evidence Iran’s nuclear program was ‘severely damaged’ as assessments of US strikes’ impact continue

By Katie Bo Lillis, Zachary Cohen and Natasha Bertrand, CNN

(CNN) — CIA Director John Ratcliffe on Wednesday said in a statement that the agency had obtained “a body of credible evidence [that] indicates Iran’s Nuclear Program has been severely damaged” by recent strikes, underscoring a broad intelligence community effort is ongoing to determine the impact of the US strikes on three of the country’s nuclear sites on Saturday.

Without providing details, Ratcliffe said the CIA’s evidence included “new intelligence from a historically reliable source/method that several key Iranian nuclear facilities were destroyed and would have to be rebuilt over the course of years.”

It was not clear whether Ratcliffe was offering an official agency assessment or his view of the intelligence.

The statement came a day after an initial analysis by the Defense Intelligence Agency that suggested that strikes by the US on Saturday did not destroy some key components of Iran’s nuclear program and likely only set back Tehran’s nuclear ambitions by a matter of months was reported by CNN and other outlets.

The White House has pushed back on that assessment, which cast doubt on President Donald Trump’s claims that the strikes “obliterated” Iran’s ability to produce a weapon, calling it “wrong.”

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard also posted on X on Wednesday that “new intelligence” supported the notion that Iran’s nuclear facilities were “destroyed” in the strikes.

“New intelligence confirms what @POTUS has stated numerous times: Iran’s nuclear facilities have been destroyed,” Gabbard posted without providing evidence. “If the Iranians chose to rebuild, they would have to rebuild all three facilities (Natanz, Fordow, Esfahan) entirely, which would likely take years to do.”

It’s not unusual for intelligence agencies to disagree in subtle ways when making a judgment call about how to interpret raw reporting. Although it’s not yet clear what additional collection and analysis is ongoing beyond the CIA and the DIA efforts, other agencies, including the Pentagon arm responsible for satellite imagery analysis, are almost certainly also closely scrutinizing the impact of the strikes on Iran’s nuclear program.

The final US military “battle damage assessment,” by the DIA could take days or even weeks to complete, multiple sources familiar with the Pentagon’s process told CNN.

The initial DIA analysis was produced just 24 hours after the attack, according to one of the sources. Because it was only a preliminary analysis, its judgments were “low-confidence,” the sources said. It was not coordinated with the wider intelligence community, according to a US official, and the document itself acknowledged that it could take weeks to produce a finalized assessment.

When the military conducts a BDA, it typically follows three proscribed phases: Phase I assesses the physical damage done to the target sites. Phase II assesses the functional impact on the target. Phase III zooms out to encompass all the intelligence the military has to assess the overall impact on the system the US was trying to impact – in this case, Iran’s nuclear program.

The DIA assessment that CNN and other outlets reported on was a Phase III analysis. But it was only an initial report, based on roughly 24 hours’ worth of intelligence gathering. As time passes and more intelligence becomes available, the military will repeat the this process before it finalizes its judgment.

Trump on Wednesday conceded that initial US intelligence assessments found the damage caused by the US bombers “could be limited,” before adding that follow-up work showed it was “obliterated.”

“The document said it could be very severe damage,” Trump said, referring to the DIA assessment. “They said it could be limited or it could be very severe. They really didn’t know other than to say it could be limited or it could be very, very severe.”

Trump said the US has since “collected additional intelligence” and has spoken with people who have “seen the site.”

The initial findings cast doubt on Trump’s insistence that Saturday’s strikes “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capabilities and suggest that he made the claim before the military and US intelligence agencies had enough information to adequately assess the impact. Allies and top officials – including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth – have sought to back up the president’s view.

The president has sought to characterize the strikes as a one-off designed to make it impossible for Iran to ever obtain a nuclear weapon, while experts have said that a single operation was not likely sufficient to achieve that goal.

In particular, questions have swirled about the extent of the damage to one of the facilities, Isfahan, where Iran is believed to have stored highly enriched uranium deep underground.

US officials believe Iran also maintains secret nuclear facilities that were not targeted in the strike and remain operational, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

“I’ve been briefed on this plan in the past, and it was never meant to completely destroy the nuclear facilities, but rather cause significant damage,” Republican Rep. Michael McCaul, the chairman emeritus of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told CNN on Tuesday, referring to the US military plans to strike Iranian nuclear facilities. “But it was always known to be a temporary setback.”

Another key question, according to a senior US lawmaker, is whether Iran had already moved any of its highly enriched uranium stockpiles from the facilities in question by the time the US dropped bombs on them. Trump had made public he was weighing striking at least one of the sites, Fordow, and “Iranians aren’t idiots,” this person said.

A final Phase III BDA traditionally includes a recommendation about whether any additional military strikes are necessary to achieve the commander’s objective. The preliminary report did not contain any such recommendations, according to two sources familiar with the document.

Initial assessments like the one produced by the DIA are often based at least in part on technical modeling of the effects of this kind of bomb on the US’s best map of the facilities, experts say.

And these assessments can change dramatically over time.

“We had this problem in 1999,” said Jeffrey Lewis, a weapons expert and professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. “The initial BDA on the bombing against Yugoslavia was very high levels of success” based on modeling, he recalled. But with time and more analysis – and on the ground investigation – officials realized many of the things they had assessed as targets that were successfully hit wound up being decoys. “The BDA came way down.”

In this instance, it’s not clear US officials will ever be able to physically inspect the sites.

That leaves intelligence analysts reliant on satellite imagery, intercepted communications, and intelligence shared by allies like Israel to piece together what happened.

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