WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has fired a general whose agency’s initial intelligence assessment of damage[1] to Iranian nuclear sites from U.S. strikes angered President Donald Trump[2], according to two people familiar with the decision and a White House official.
Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse will no longer serve as head of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, according to the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly.
The firing is the latest upheaval in the U.S. military and intelligence agencies, and comes a few months after details of the preliminary assessment leaked to the media. It found that Iran’s nuclear program has been set back only a few months by the U.S. strikes, contradicting assertions from Trump[3] and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The Republican president, who had pronounced the Iranian program “completely and fully obliterated," rejected the report.
In a news conference following the June strikes, Hegseth lambasted the press[4] for focusing on the preliminary assessment but did not offer any direct evidence of the destruction of Iranian nuclear production facilities.
“You want to call it destroyed, you want to call it defeated, you want to call it obliterated — choose your word. This was an historically successful attack,” Hegseth said then.
Kruse's ouster was reported earlier by The Washington Post.
Trump has a history of removing government officials whose data and analysis he disagrees with[5]. Earlier this month, after a lousy jobs report, he fired the official in charge of the data. His administration has also stopped posting reports on climate change[6], canceled studies on vaccine access[7] and removed data on gender identity[8] from government sites.
The firing of the DIA chief culminates a week of broad Trump administration changes to the intelligence community and shakeups to the military leadership. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence — which is responsible for coordinating the work of 18 intelligence agencies, including DIA — announced that it would slash its staff and budget[9].
The Pentagon announced this week that the Air Force’s top uniformed officer, Gen. David Allvin, planned to retire[10] two years early.
Hegseth and Trump have been aggressive in dismissing top military officials, often without formal explanation.
The administration has fired Air Force Gen. CQ Brown Jr.[11] as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as the Navy’s top officer, the Air Force’s second highest-ranking officer, and the top lawyers for three military service branches.
In April, Hegseth fired Gen. Tim Haugh[12] as head of the National Security Agency and Vice Adm. Shoshana Chatfield[13], who was a senior official at NATO.
No public explanations have been offered by the Pentagon for any of these firings, though some of the officers were believed by the administration to endorse diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
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