Inside Trump's Decision
A team of Times reporters — Mark Mazzetti, Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman, Eric Schmitt and Helene Cooper — have a new article revealing how Trump came to his decision to join Israel's war against Iran, and how he and the military hid their plans to ensure that the attack remained a secret.
Late last week, Trump said he would take up to two weeks to decide whether to attack Iran's nuclear facilities. It was a deception: By that point, Trump had all but made up his mind. Military preparations were well underway.
Trump began to muse about dropping massive bunker-buster bombs onto Fordo, Iran's uranium-enrichment facility, just hours after Israel's first wave of attacks, on June 13. A day later, one adviser told The Times, Trump seemed to have already decided to go through with it.
At times, Trump's penchant for social media was the biggest threat to the operation's secrecy. Last Monday, he posted on Truth Social that 'everyone should evacuate Tehran!' The next day, he revealed that he had left a meeting of the Group of 7 in Canada not to broker a Middle East cease-fire but for something 'much bigger.' He added, 'Stay tuned!'
Inside the Pentagon and the U.S. Central Command, military planners worried that Trump was giving Iran too much warning about an impending strike. So they worked up their own ruse: They had two fleets of B-2 bombers leave Missouri at the same time, one flying east and one flying west. Flight trackers spotted the westward planes, which offered some idea of the timing of a possible attack. But those planes were a decoy.
The eastbound planes crossed the Atlantic undetected, joined with fighter jets and flew into Iranian airspace. At 2:10 a.m. local time yesterday, the lead bomber dropped two of the bunker-busters on the Fordo site. By the end of the mission, 14 of the bombs had fallen.
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