Two more blows were dealt on Sunday to the Donald Trump administration image of ruination that supposedly befell Iran’s nuclear program as a result of U.S. airstrikes.
First, a top official with the United Nations’s nuclear watchdog told CBS News that Iran’s production capabilities would be able to enrich weapons-grade uranium within a few months, in the event Iran’s government orders production of a nuclear-tipped missile.
Then, The Washington Post revealed that U.S. intelligence sources intercepted a call between top Iranian officials commenting on the strikes and describing them as less destructive than Tehran was expecting.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt fired back personally in a statement: “It’s shameful that The Washington Post is helping people commit felonies by publishing out-of-context leaks. The notion that unnamed Iranian officials know what happened under hundreds of feet of rubble is nonsense. Their nuclear weapons program is over.”
The Independent reached out Sunday for further comment.
The administration spun a narrative of total annihilation to describe the extent of damage to Iran’s nuclear program this past week after the president ordered strikes on three Iranian facilities on June 21.
An initial U.S. intelligence assessment was leaked to the press and caused headaches for the administration as it claimed that Iran’s stockpile of uranium was not hit during the attack and that centrifuges at the three sites were mostly intact following the strikes.
Officials including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth angrily scolded reporters after publication of the assessment, which they blamed on an effort to make the president look bad.
But questions remain about key parts of the nuclear weapons development process in Iran — including, most crucially, whether the full extent of Iran’s nuclear and arms production sites have actually been identified.
On Sunday, International Atomic Energy Agency director Rafael Grossi told CBS News that Iran could be producing enriched uranium within a matter of months, explaining that the country’s nuclear program did not suffer “total” destruction — as President Donald Trump explicitly claimed multiple times this past week, and again on Sunday.
“It is clear that there has been severe damage, but it’s not total damage, first of all,” Gross saidi. “And secondly, Iran has the capacities there; industrial and technological capacities. So if they so wish, they will be able to start doing this again.”
But neither Grossi nor The Washington Post’s reporting contradicted one crucial aspect of the intelligence CIA Director John Ratcliffe briefed members of Congress on this past week.
Ratcliffe and the U.S. intelligence community maintain that Iran’s metal conversion operations centered at Isfahan were wholly or near-completely destroyed, a setback that Ratcliffe maintained this past week would delay Tehran’s progress on nuclear weapons development for years, not months.
The plants are used for fabricating enriched uranium into metal, a final step in the process before it is ready for testing and use inside of an operational nuclear missile. Isfahan was the only known facility inside Iran conducting this process.
An administration official told The Post that the destruction of those capabilities proved that the depiction of events on the intercepted call was “wrong”, adding: “We know that our weapons were delivered precisely where we wanted them to be delivered and they had the effect that we wanted.”
The CIA director also told Congress that U.S. intelligence believes that the vast majority of Iran’s enriched uranium was hit during the attack and is now “buried” at Fordow. Grossi, meanwhile, maintained that it was possible Iran had moved the stockpile. The Times of Israel reported one expert as saying that it was a credible possibility for Iran to have another hidden metal conversion site.
Israeli intelligence also concluded that the Iranian program was set back by “years” due to the extent of the damage, according to The Times of Israel.
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