The head of the CIA 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 raid’s impact, the BBC reports.
John Ratcliffe, the US spy agency’s director, said key sites had been destroyed, though he stopped short of declaring that Iran’s nuclear programme had been eliminated outright.
It comes a day after a leaked preliminary assessment from a Pentagon intelligence agency suggested core components of Iran’s nuclear programme remained intact after the US bombings.
Trump again maintained the raid had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear facilities.
The Republican president took to social media on Wednesday to post that the “fake news” media had “lied and totally misrepresented the facts, none of which they had.”
He said US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and other military officials would hold an “interesting and irrefutable” news conference on Thursday at the Pentagon “in order to fight for the Dignity of our Great American Pilots.”
