What US intelligence and leaks tell us about 'Operation Midnight Hammer'

Australia Broadcast Center

4 hours ago

The stealthy B2 planes, decoy flights, operational security, Pentagon deceptions, shrouded details on a new bomb never before used in combat, the secret facility they were dropped into in Iran — almost everything about the American strikes on Fordow works against a complete public accounting of what "Operation Midnight Hammer" achieved.
No wonder there's a yawning gap between Donald Trump's version about "total obliteration" of Iran's nuclear programme and the more nuanced, if not contradictory, language adopted by others in US military and intelligence communities.
It's not semantic hair-splitting either.
Between Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's description of nuclear assets being "decimated", the CIA's "severely damaged" and Israel's conclusion that Iran's nuclear facilities are "inoperable" sit serious considerations about what happens next in this most unstable region as well as the veracity of Trump's suggestion that "American strength has paved the way for peace".
Almost a week on from the US intervention, the truth about what happened in Fordow stays in Fordow.
Hegseth's dismissive quip that "if you want to know what's going on at Fordow, you'd better go there and take a big shovel" is probably closer to the mark than US intelligence agencies would care to admit.
The point is; "battle damage assessments" — as the military calls the evaluation process — are, by necessity, being done remotely via satellite and other imagery, none of which is capable of gaining pictures where it matters most; beneath the surface.
Apart from US aircrew accounts of what they saw from the cockpit, any on-the-ground intelligence drawn from human sources will take much longer to obtain or assess.
So for now, we're left to rely on a portion of a preliminary top secret classified report on all the sites bombed during "Midnight Hammer", prepared by the Pentagon's Defence Intelligence Agency.
CNN and the New York Times were among the first to quote people familiar with the DIA's report saying centrifuges were largely "intact" and another unnamed person who conveyed that "the assessment is that the US set them (Iranians) back maybe a few months, tops".
Although CNN's reporting came with plenty of caveats about it being "early for the US to have a comprehensive picture", the obvious divergence from the White House line quickly unleashed the Trump administration's full fury.
"Flat-out wrong," seethed White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, "biased" vented Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, taking aim at the leakers and publishers alike.
Hegseth's condemnation is no doubt infused with a fair amount of mock indignation, safe in the knowledge that attacking the media in hyperbolic ways will never get any member of the Trump cabinet fired — the boss created that genre after all.
But just as George W Bush would learn the hard way with a premature "mission accomplished" banner in the Iraq war, a president's credibility and authority is diminished if unfounded assertions are made about the success of military operations.
Two things need to happen for Trump's claims about "Operation Midnight Hammer" to withstand scrutiny over time.
The first is that no enriched uranium cannisters previously stored at Fordow or elsewhere were removed and are later discovered in a revamped Iranian program.
The second is that the broader US intelligence community, from Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence to the CIA's John Ratcliffe, need to firm in their conclusions that the strikes were every bit as devastating as Trump and Hegseth have declared.
On this, Gabbard and Ratcliffe have converged in recent days, with the CIA director stating "a body of credible intelligence indicates Iran's Nuclear Program has been severely damaged" and DNI Gabbard posting "new intelligence confirms what @POTUS has stated numerous times: Iran's nuclear facilities have been destroyed".
But on the mission-critical question of whether any near-weapons-grade uranium was removed from Iranian facilities, the administration is far more circumspect with its language.
We know the Iranians must have had ample suspicion Fordow was about to be bombed because, according to the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine, they had time to plug two ventilation shafts with loads of concrete.
Would that time also have allowed for trucks to shift material out?
"I am not aware of any intelligence that I've reviewed that says things were not where they were supposed to be, moved or otherwise," Secretary Hegseth told reporters at his Pentagon briefing.
You could drive a truck through that answer, which is far from a denial that the Iranians hadn't used dozens of them to move stockpiles days before the B2s flew overhead.
Underscoring Pete Hegseth's confidence that the "obliteration" narrative will eventually stand as the story of record from "Midnight Hammer" is the 'fog of war' truism.
It holds that the first accounts of combat operations nearly always turn out to be substantially wrong, confused by scattered individual recollections of events rather than being tested for common threads over time.
That's why the administration is imploring the media to wait for a refined intelligence picture to emerge.
For additional context, Hegseth has argued that the initial top secret Defence Intelligence Agency report covered by CNN, the New York Times and other media outlets was prepared as a "re-strike report" giving information to commanders "to see whether a target would need to be re-struck".
If Washington's broader intelligence community ever settled on a final view that's in line with the leaked partial quotes we've seen from the DIA, for any consistency in the objective of destroying Iran's nuclear weapons capacity, another round of strikes would presumably have to come into consideration.
Then again, due to the embarrassment it'd cause for so many from the president down, we might never know — neither Hegseth nor Caine has committed to any complete intelligence assessment of the bombing operation being publicly released.