CIA director says Iran’s nuclear sites ‘severely damaged’

The CIA chief said that the American strikes “have seriously damaged” Iran’s nuclear installations and made them go back, diverging from a disclosed intelligence report, which made President Donald Trump, minimizing the impact of the raid.

John Ratcliffe, the director of the American spy agency, said the key sites had been destroyed, although he has ceased to declare that Iran’s nuclear program had been eliminated.

This comes one day after a disclosed preliminary assessment of a Pentagon intelligence agency suggested that the central components of the Iranian nuclear program remained intact after the American bombing.

Trump again maintained that the raid had “erased” Iran’s nuclear installations.

The Republican President went to social networks on Wednesday to publish that the “false news” media had “lied and completely distorted the facts, of which they had no”.

He said that US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and other military officials would organize an interesting and irrefutable “press conference on Thursday at the Pentagon” in order to fight for the dignity of our big American pilots “.

He came then that Israel and Iran seemed a second day honoring a fragile ceasefire that Trump helped negotiate this week on the 12th day of war.

Speaking in The Hague, where he attended a NATO summit on Wednesday, Trump said about strikes: “It was very serious. It was an obliteration.”

He also said that he would likely ask for a commitment from Iran to end his nuclear ambitions during talks next week. Iran has not recognized such negotiations.

But the American envoy in the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, told Us Network NBC that there had been direct and indirect communication between countries.

Ratcliffe’s declaration, which was appointed by Trump, said that CIA information included “new information from a historically reliable and precise source / method that several key Iranian nuclear installations were destroyed and should be rebuilt in the years”.

The director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard also released in favor of the evaluation of Trump on damage to Iranian nuclear installations.

“If the Iranians chose to rebuild, they should rebuild the three installations (Natanz, Fordo, Esfahan), which would probably take years to do,” she wrote on X.

The American operation involved 125 military planes, targeting the three main Iranian nuclear installations on Saturday.

New satellite images show six craters grouped around two entry points in Fordo, with similar craters identified in Isfahan – but it is not clear if the nuclear installations located deep underground have been destroyed.

A report by the Pentagon Defense Intelligence Agency was disclosed to the American media on Tuesday, saying that the American bombardment had brought the Iran nuclear program “only a few months”.

The US Secretary of Defense said that the evaluation had been made with “low confidence”.

Familiar officials with the evaluation warned that it was an early evaluation that could change as more information emerges. The United States has 18 intelligence agencies, which sometimes produce contradictory reports according to its mission and its field of expertise.

The UN nuclear supervisor, Rafael Grossi, said on Wednesday that there was a chance that Tehran had moved a large part of his highly enriched uranium while he was attacked.

But the spokesman for the Iranian Foreign Ministry, Esmail Baghaei, said on Wednesday in Al Jazeera: “Our nuclear installations were seriously damaged, that is sure.” He did not develop.

A report by the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission said that the Fordo strike “had destroyed the critical infrastructure of the site”.

The damage to all sites, according to the report, have pushed the Iran calendar for nuclear weapons from “several years”.

However, Mehdi Mohammadi, an adviser to the president of the Iranian Parliament, said shortly after the United States only “leads to irreversible damage has been suffered” in Fordo.

Iran has long argued that its nuclear program is peaceful. American intelligence agencies have already declared that Tehran did not actively build atomic weapons.

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