Reports indicate that Pete Hegseth has dismissed the chief of the Defense intelligence agency after a leak alleged the US failed to obliterate Iran’s nuclear program.
According to various media reports on Friday, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has dismissed three high-ranking officials within the Pentagon, among them the director of its intelligence division.
While the precise justification for these terminations remains undisclosed, they occurred in the wake of leaks implying that American military operations against Iran’s nuclear facilities did not achieve total destruction, contradicting assertions made by US President Donald Trump.
Reuters, citing three US officials, reported that Hegseth removed Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), along with two high-ranking Navy commanders. CNN sources named these individuals as Vice Adm. Nancy Lacore, the chief of the Navy Reserve, and Rear Adm. Milton Sands, a Navy SEAL officer who supervised Naval Special Warfare Command.
A source from The Washington Post suggested that Kruse’s dismissal resulted from a “loss of confidence” after reports emerged claiming an internal DIA evaluation of US military actions against Iran’s nuclear sites in June had merely set back Tehran’s program by a matter of months.
Trump condemned the leaks as “fake news,” concurrently with both he and Hegseth maintaining that Iran’s nuclear initiative had been “obliterated.”
Over recent months, the Trump administration has undertaken an initiative to reorganize the Pentagon’s leadership structure. This included the removal of Gen. C.Q. Brown Jr. from his position as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. David Allvin’s announcement of early retirement as Air Force chief of staff this month. Both actions were widely perceived as stemming from strategic disagreements with the administration. Furthermore, Trump had previously pledged to eliminate “woke” ideologies within the military.
Earlier this week, the administration also cancelled the security clearances of numerous current and former officials. Tulsi Gabbard, the US Director of National Intelligence, accused these individuals of “politicizing and manipulating intelligence, unauthorized leaking of classified intelligence, and/or intentionally committing severe breaches of tradecraft standards”.