‘This Really Terrible Doom Loop': A Reality Check on the Iran Strikes

Politico

4 hours ago

In the hours after U.S. warplanes struck three Iranian nuclear facilities, President Donald Trump was quick to announce that the country's key nuclear enrichment facilities had been 'totally obliterated.'
Then came a leak to the media: A preliminary intelligence assessment had found important sites were not destroyed, calling into question the impact on Iran's nuclear program. The revelations fueled an uproar and put Trump on the defensive, as top U.S. officials rushed to release further details about the bombings.
So, were the strikes a success, or should we still be worried about Iran's nuclear capabilities? Perhaps both, according to Beth Sanner, a longtime intelligence official who frequently delivered Trump's intelligence brief during his first term in office.
'We can have two things be true,' Sanner said in an interview with POLITICO Magazine. 'We can have it be true that the bombing campaign was successful in destroying particular facilities or capabilities at particular facilities, and we still have questions about the Iran nuclear program and what might be left.'
Ordinarily, it would take weeks to put together a comprehensive picture about the impact of a strike like this, said Sanner, who previously served as deputy director of national intelligence for mission integration, overseeing the parts of the intelligence community that coordinate and lead collection and analysis across the U.S. spy agencies.
But the political news cycle won't wait that long. And now there's another danger: If the intelligence community ultimately determines the strikes weren't effective or Iran was able to get its enriched uranium out of the way, the administration may now be far less likely to publicly admit it.
'This is where we are,' she said. 'It makes it really hard to do the right thing.'
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I want to start with the preliminary damage assessment produced by the Defense Intelligence Agency that was first reported by CNN. How are these initial assessments put together, and how much stock would you put in a preliminary assessment so soon after a strike like this?
I'll answer the second part first. How I would take it is with a grain of salt. It will say upfront, very clearly, what the limitations are of this. And this is why having somebody leak something like this is not only illegal and should not be done — no offense to all the journalists out there — but it's also hugely unhelpful because it's confusing to people. No one even knows exactly what it said. They don't have a copy of it.
I think there is a lot of confusion that's raised by something like this, and it's really not designed for public distribution, or even wide distribution among people who aren't making decisions.
An initial bomb damage assessment is an initial look at these sorts of things. It is really designed for operators and for policymakers to decide what their next move is. It's for tactical decision making. It's not for strategic decision making. In other words, did we miss something? Do we need to go back?
What kind of information streams will intelligence officials be looking at in the wake of a strike like this, and how long would it normally take to put a fulsome assessment together of its impact?
On something like this, one should understand that each assessment, no matter when it's put out, it's not going to stop in time. There will be a continuation of a gathering of information. More information will be found, even after a very fulsome assessment is done, and nobody just shuts down and says, 'We're done.'
I think it will take a couple weeks to do a really good job. This type of assessment is generally done by the National Intelligence Council to take a complete intelligence community view. You want to have the input from all the different expertise that's quite varied, and the sources of intelligence that are quite varied across the entire intelligence community. From instrumentation, measuring things, overhead collection, SIGINT [signals intelligence], intercepts of conversations, human intelligence. That human intelligence might be from liaison services. In other words, our friends and allies, partners, open source — somebody took pictures — all sorts of things. And it's also going to take in all of the disciplines, we call them in the intelligence community, meaning different kinds of expertise.
So you'll have nuclear scientists, you'll have specialists in missiles, you'll have leadership analysts looking at the hierarchy of the scientific community that's been eliminated and who's left, what's their expertise?
Trump has said repeatedly that Iran's nuclear facilities have been 'obliterated.' Is that too strong a word to use at this stage?
From his comments at the NATO summit, somebody used that word with him, he says, and it was repeated by him, and I think now we're in this really terrible doom loop where we're having a conversation — this battle between obliterated and not obliterated — and in fact, we're obliterating the nuance in the way that this conversation is going.
We should probably be focused less on that word and try to develop a broader vocabulary to capture the fact that we can have two things be true. We can have it be true that the bombing campaign was successful in destroying particular facilities or capabilities at particular facilities, and we still have questions about the Iran nuclear program and what might be left outside of these areas that were bombed, because the program is more than these three facilities.
Staying on the point about vocabulary, both CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released statements Wednesday stating that Iran's nuclear facilities had been 'destroyed.' What did you make of their decision to issue those statements?
I've been on the other end of editing these things myself, going over each word. These are carefully crafted and worded to be analytically true, but also to, in this case I believe, to reinforce the administration's narrative that this was successful.
I think that it was successful, but I also have major concerns about what's left. So when I look at that statement, it says that the program has been severely damaged, and it says several key Iranian nuclear facilities were destroyed and would have to be rebuilt over the course of years.
I think that these are true statements, but they're designed to check the box and support the narrative while also staying true to the facts, given the controversy.
So it sounds like you're saying that it's likely true that these sites that were struck have been destroyed, but that there still is potentially a lot we don't know about Iran's nuclear program at this point and its status.
I think when you look at the words very, very carefully, which I am trained to do, [it says] 'several key Iranian nuclear facilities were destroyed.' It does not say that Fordo was destroyed completely. It does not say that Isfahan and Natanz were destroyed completely. It says 'several nuclear facilities,' and that is true. The Arak plutonium plant has been destroyed, the Isfahan metal conversion plant, the Natanz centrifuge facility, some production lines, etc. So I don't think that these statements say that Iran's nuclear program has been destroyed. It says facilities.
What key questions remain unanswered for you at this point, based on what we know publicly?
We need to know some practical things about what is left in Iran's knowledge and capacity to build a bomb. You can't bomb away knowledge.
We need to know what Iran's intent is. What is their leadership's intent? Do they intend to now try harder than ever to put their nuclear weapons program underground to produce that weapon, even if it takes years? Because they have been taught a lesson that is as clear as day — that being a threshold state does not protect them, only a nuclear weapon would.
Knowing where the details of where things are, what's their capacity and remaining capability, and then what is their intent. And then going into these negotiations that [Special Envoy] Steve Witkoff says will happen, we want to know some very specific things about what Iran's red lines are and the ability to work through those things so we can get to a peaceful solution.
The administration has been quick to say that Iran's nuclear facilities have been destroyed, but they've said a lot less about the whereabouts of Iran's highly enriched uranium. Tehran was thought to have some 400 kilograms of enriched uranium before the strikes. Do you think that the administration or the intelligence community knows what happened to those stockpiles?
What I'm worried about, in part, is the pressure on the administration to say more than they should say about this issue, because that could reveal sources and methods that make it harder for us to track these things. And the more they feel that they have to defend themselves, the more they're likely to spill the beans that will be a problem in the future for protecting our national security.
That said, what you're seeing from the Israelis, and some statements by the Americans, is that the HEU [highly enriched uranium] has been buried. In other words, it's underneath these tunnels, under Isfahan and under Fordo and under Natanz. I don't know if we have fidelity on that. Probably once Israel was in the skies over Iran, the ability to track what was happening at those facilities was very high. The question for me is whether some of that material was moved before we had that kind of ability — the intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance that we had from Israel once they went in.
To your point, there have been reports about trucks being seen outside of Fordo ahead of the U.S. strikes, which raised speculation that the regime may have spirited some of its uranium out of harm's way. I will also say here that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said Thursday morning that he has seen no intelligence to suggest that the uranium was moved.
I've also heard speculation that Iran may have other undeclared nuclear facilities. Meanwhile, Iran's parliament also voted to halt IAEA inspections. Is there a risk that U.S. officials will now have less visibility about Iran's nuclear capabilities and intentions in the wake of these strikes, if Iran feels the need to move it further into the shadows?
Yes and no. I would say that we know that Israeli penetration of Iranian intelligence services is just very, very heightened. I would say that the unhappiness with the regime and the inability to protect Iran is probably going to increase the ability to recruit officials and find more information. But they're also going to be a lot more careful. Maybe some of our disclosures are going to make our SIGINT [signals intelligence] collection more difficult.
Those 16 trucks, that happened when we had a very close eye on Fordo. Maybe they didn't spirit away HEU, but that's not where most of it was stored anyway. Maybe they spirited away something else. Maybe, as some have suggested, they were trying to put cement over those entrance ways to protect it more, so lots can happen. We were following those trucks, I'm confident. Other things that happened before are more worrisome.
Such as?
We don't know what has happened before. In mid-May, the Iranians sent a letter to the UN, and they threatened to move their HEU and other special parts of their program. I don't think they said it specifically to another facility. Then they said, in another statement, in response to the IAEA censure against them, that they were going to open a third enrichment site and move their HEU. So I think that this idea that there might be a covert facility somewhere else is something that is a very reasonable question to be asked, because they've telegraphed that, and people have been talking about that for years.
Tulsi Gabbard testified in March that the intelligence community assessed that Iran was not looking to build a nuclear weapon, but did have an unprecedented amount of enriched uranium for a non-nuclear power. I understand that there is debate about that assessment in intelligence circles, and I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about the main schools of thought on Iran's intentions with its nuclear enrichment and why this is such a hard question to answer.
It's hard unless you have exquisite access to exactly what the Supreme Leader has said and ordered. The conventional interpretation of that statement is that, yes, there's been a lot of work done to prepare to make a weapon, but the final order to actually sprint to build a bomb had not been given.
The problem with it is that can all be true today, but that Iran was getting so close to being able to weaponize, it didn't matter whether that order to go for it or not had been made. It was close enough that somebody had to do something to put a stop to that process. And so it can be an esoteric, semantic debate at some point, and that's certainly been the Israeli argument.
What do you make of recent reports that Trump has grown frustrated with Tulsi Gabbard? Is she able to do her job as DNI if she lacks Trump's confidence?
That's a very tricky question, and I try not to criticize anybody personally in government. I try to limit myself to policies rather than people. I don't want to be one of these pundits. But I would say that the healthy relationship between the head of intelligence and the president is very important to national security, because if the president cannot listen and hear the intelligence community, then we have a problem.
When I was briefing President Trump, even in the days when, on the outside, it looked like things were very bad between the intelligence leadership and the president, I was always welcomed into the Oval Office and able to give my briefing. And if you get to a point where he cannot have that happen, where that's closed off, then I think things have to change. Maybe that's why Director [Dan] Coats decided to resign.
This leak has kind of put the administration on the defensive, and they've been very quick to issue further assessments. How confident are you that if there was intelligence that the strikes hadn't been fully effective, or Iran was able to get its enriched uranium out of the way, or that their nuclear facilities weren't completely destroyed, that the administration would actually admit that publicly now, given that they have rushed out to say that it's been destroyed?
Yep, this is where we are. It makes it really hard to do the right thing. Because any assessment that equates the bombing with the nuclear program is the problem. They are not the same thing, and they need to be separated out. We can have a win on the bombing, but still have issues that we need to deal with on Iran's threat. And that is what the next phase of negotiations will be, and the bombing, hopefully, has created conditions where that can happen. So that's where I would try to shift the narrative here.
Well, Trump said yesterday he doesn't even feel the need to have a deal with Iran anymore.
Yes, and that needs to change. I think that the fact that Witkoff is empowered, and he said yesterday that we are shooting for a comprehensive peace agreement, that gives me hope.