Donald Trump appears to have blurted out top-secret intelligence on allied operations in enemy territory – again.

Reinforcing the reputation of his entire administration as being incontinent with secrets, he twice seemed to suggest at the Nato summit in the Hague that Israel had agents on the ground in Iran assessing the damage done by America’s bombardment of Fordow and other nuclear facilities.

Smarting from intelligence assessments leaked to the New York Times and CNN that cast doubt on his claim to have “obliterated” the nuclear programme with bunker-busting bombs and Tomahawk missiles, Trump used the most sensitive work of an allied nation to bolster his claims.

He insisted that his verdict of complete success was accurate, likening the US strikes on Iran to the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that hastened the end of the Second World War, then revealed that more data would soon be coming from Israel, which means Mossad agents on the ground.

“It was hit brutally and it knocked it out... And it’s going to come out. Israel is doing a report on it now. I understand… You know, they have guys that go in there after the hit.”

Later, he said: “I think Israel is going to be telling us very soon because Bibi is going to have people involved in that whole situation.”

In May 2017, Trump blurted highly classified intelligence that had been shared with the US by Israel to the Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, then the Russian ambassador to Washington. Lavrov is a former Russian intelligence officer.

He jeopardised the life of a source that was working inside the so-called Islamic State, caused Israel extreme operational embarrassment, and set off a damage control operation by the CIA and other agencies.

He then lost the trust of very close US allies in the Five Eyes secrets-sharing network, which includes Britain, the US, New Zealand, Australia and Canada. He has also damaged his standing among the spy agencies of the Middle East.

Since then he has stored secret files in his toilet at home where they could have been read by foreign agents.

His CIA chief, director of national intelligence, defence secretary and diplomatic envoy to Russia also used their private telephones to communicate real-time operational “eyes only” level details via the Signal app during US bombing missions against the Houthis in Yemen.

Pete Hegseth, Trump’s defence secretary, who uses his private phone for secret communications and would be summarily dismissed and risk prosecution if he did so in most Nato countries, was furious at the most recent leaks that provoked his boss to double down on his boasts about Iran.

“So this is a political motive here,” he said.

“Of course, we’re doing a leak investigation with the FBI right now because this information is for internal purposes, battle damage assessments, and CNN and others are trying to spin it to make the president look bad when this was an overwhelming success.”

The president then went on to reveal what is likely to be either a lie or secret information somehow gleaned by agents from Iran. Tehran has insisted that the attacks on Fordow failed.

Trump said: “They went down, Iran went down to the site afterwards. They said it’s so devastated and they settled when they saw what we did to it… Two Iranians went down to see it and they called back and they said, ‘This place is gone’.”

Only secret agents working inside the Iranian government would have this kind of detail – that two people did an on-the-ground survey.

“It was hit brutally, and it knocked it out. The original word that I use, I guess it got us in trouble because it’s a strong word. It was obliteration. And you’ll see that. And it’s going to come out. Israel is doing a report on it now. I understand…

“You know, they have guys that go in there after the hit,” said the president of the United States – risking the lives of any agents who might be on the ground or in the Iranian inner circle.

He did so, he insisted, not to prove that he was right, but “I don’t want it for me. I want it for the pilots. I want it for the military. They did such a good job”.

Iran knows that Mossad operatives have been on the ground in their country for years. Israel’s foreign intelligence has posted its own videos of them flying drones against Iranian targets over the last couple of weeks and said that they had also identified Iranian missile locations.

Israel has also tracked and killed at least 14 Iranian nuclear scientists and many top security officials in their own homes and in moving vehicles.

But Trump’s latest outburst will further confirm that he’ll put his own need for praise over the lives of intelligence operatives on the ground.

Given his close relationship and history with Russia, that will be causing consternation at Nato as allies gather to plan how to meet Vladimir Putin’s land-grabbing ambitions.

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Trump declares ‘victory for everybody’ despite doubts over US strikes

United States President Donald Trump has declared a “victory for everybody” as the ceasefire that ended 12 days of fighting between Iran and Israel continues to hold, despite uncertainty over the effectiveness of US strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites.

Trump, speaking in The Hague where he attended a NATO summit on Wednesday, said his decision to join Israel’s attacks by targeting Iranian nuclear sites with huge bunker-busting bombs had ended the war, calling it “a victory for everybody”.

He shrugged off an initial assessment by the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) that Iran’s path to building a nuclear weapon may have been set back only by months, saying the findings were “inconclusive” and he believed the sites had been destroyed.

“It was very severe. It was obliteration,” he said.

“The intelligence was … very inconclusive,” Trump told reporters while meeting with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte before the summit.

“The intelligence says, ‘We don’t know, it could have been very severe.’ That’s what the intelligence says. So I guess that’s correct, but I think we can take the ‘we don’t know’. It was very severe. It was obliteration,” Trump added.

An initial intelligence evaluation suggested that the US bombardment failed to destroy Iran’s underground nuclear facilities, The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN reported on Tuesday, citing officials familiar with the military intelligence report from the DIA.

Two people familiar with the assessment had told CNN that Iran’s “enriched uranium was not destroyed” and the centrifuges were “largely intact”.

Another source told the US broadcaster that, according to the assessment, enriched uranium had been moved before the US strikes on Sunday.

Trump has maintained that the US strikes destroyed nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan.

He also said the US strikes were responsible for ending the war between Israel and Iran and compared them with the use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, which brought an end to World War II in 1945.

“I don’t want to use an example of Hiroshima, I don’t want to use an example of Nagasaki, but that was essentially the same thing. That ended that war. This ended the war,” Trump said.

When reporters asked him about Iran rebuilding its nuclear programme on Tuesday, Trump said: “That place is under rock. That place is demolished.”

Trump, who arrived in the Netherlands late on Tuesday for NATO’s annual summit, was sitting beside Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who both also cast doubt on the reliability of the DIA assessment.

“When you actually look at the report – by the way, it was a top secret report – it was preliminary, it was low-confidence,” Hegseth said. “This is a political motive here.”

The White House also said the intelligence assessment was “flat-out wrong”.

Press secretary Karoline Leavitt told CNN in a statement: “Everyone knows what happens when you drop fourteen 30,000 pound bombs perfectly on their targets: total obliteration.”

Steve Witkoff, the US special envoy to the Middle East, also dismissed the intelligence report.

“All three of those had most, if not all, the centrifuges damaged or destroyed in a way that it will be almost impossible for them to resurrect that programme,” Witkoff told Fox News on Monday night.

“In my view, and in many other experts’ views who have seen the raw data, it will take a period of years.”

Witkoff also called the leaking of the report “treasonous”.

“It ought to be investigated. And whoever did it, whoever is responsible for it, should be held accountable,” he added.

Reporting from Washington, DC, Al Jazeera’s Shihab Rattansi said an information war is under way.

“There are clearly figures in Washington who are very keen to leak a very preliminary Defense Intelligence Agency bombing assessment,” he said.

He noted that White House reporters received a press statement, saying the “leaking of this alleged assessment is a clear attempt to demean President Trump and discredit the brave fighter pilots who conducted a perfectly executed mission to obliterate Iran’s nuclear programme”.

“This is the first moment we are seeing, post-bombing, of the information landscape and how this information will be used and what effect it might have on Donald Trump going forward,” Rattansi said.

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US didn’t destroy Iran’s nuclear programme: Here’s what new intel says

The United States’ strikes on three key Iranian nuclear sites on Sunday failed to destroy underground facilities, and set Tehran’s nuclear programme back only by a few months, according to an assessment of a confidential American intelligence report.

The “top secret” document prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) – the intelligence arm of the Pentagon – and published by major US news outlets on Tuesday is at odds with President Donald Trump’s claims about the strikes. Trump has insisted that the nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan were “obliterated” by a combination of bunker busting and conventional bombs.

Trump and his administration’s senior officials are dismissing the intelligence report and calling out the reporting over the DIA’s assessment as “fake news”.

Speaking at a NATO summit in The Hague, the US president said he believed Iran’s nuclear programme was set back by decades.

So, what did the DIA assessment say about US strikes? What has Iran said about the attacks? And how does the intelligence report contrast with the Trump administration’s public claims?

What did the DIA report say?

A preliminary report prepared by the DIA noted that rather than obliterating Iran’s nuclear programme, the US bombings had only set it back by a few months.

Before Israel attacked Iran on June 13, US agencies had noted that if Iran rushed to assemble a nuclear weapon, it would take it about three months.

The DIA’s five-page report now estimates this to be delayed by less than six months, reported The New York Times. As per the early findings, the US strikes blocked the entrances to two of the facilities but did not collapse the underground facilities.

The DIA report also reveals that the US agency believes that Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium was moved before the strikes, which destroyed little of the nuclear material.

Shortly after the US strikes on June 22, Mehdi Mohammadi, an adviser to the chairman of the Iranian parliament, claimed that the authorities had evacuated the Fordow facility in advance. “Iran has been expecting strikes on Fordow for several days. This nuclear facility was evacuated, no irreversible damage was sustained during today’s attack,” Mohammadi had said.

The US president on Wednesday said he doesn’t buy Iranian claims that they moved enriched uranium out of the Fordow nuclear facility. “I believe they didn’t have a chance to get anything out because they acted fast,” said Trump. “If it would have taken two weeks, maybe, but it’s very hard to remove that kind of material… and very dangerous.

“Plus, they knew we were coming,” Trump added. “And if they know we’re coming, they’re not going to be down there.”

CNN first reported on the DIA report, quoting unnamed officials that the US strikes’ effect on all three sites – Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan – was largely restricted to aboveground structures, which were severely damaged.

On Tuesday, the Trump administration told the United Nations Security Council that the US strikes had “degraded” the Iranian facilities – short of Trump’s earlier assertion that the attacks had “obliterated” the sites.

The strikes have reportedly badly damaged the electrical system at the Fordow facility. However, it was not immediately clear how long Iran could take to gain access to the underground facilities and repair these systems.

On Monday, Rafael Grossi, the head of the UN nuclear watchdog IAEA, said that while “no one, including the IAEA, is in a position to have fully assessed the underground damage at Fordow”, it is expected to be “very significant”.

Two people familiar with the DIA’s assessment told CNN that Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium was not destroyed and the centrifuges are largely “intact”.

Some analysts cautioned against drawing final conclusions. Analysts told the Reuters news agency that the extent of damage to the Fordow uranium enrichment facility would not necessarily be revealed if the assessment was based on satellite imagery.

How did the US strike Iranian nuclear sites?

After 10 days of fighting between Israel and Iran, the US had militarily intervened on June 22 by hitting the Iranian nuclear sites.

Fordow is a highly fortified underground uranium enrichment facility reportedly buried hundreds of metres deep in the mountains in northwestern Iran. While Natanz is Iran’s largest and most central enrichment complex, containing vast halls of centrifuges, some underground, Isfahan is a major nuclear research and production centre that includes a uranium conversion facility and fuel fabrication plants.

The US forces dropped 14 30,000-pound (13,000kg) bunker-buster bombs, while Navy submarines are said to have coordinated strikes by cruise missiles at the Natanz and Isfahan sites.

The GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) – the most powerful bunker-buster bomb in the US military arsenal weighing nearly 13,000kg (30,000lb) – was used in the strike.

The US intervention was understood to be critical for the Israeli campaign against Iranian nuclear facilities, especially Fordow, due to its depth that kept it out of reach for the Israeli military.

How did the DIA report contrast with Trump’s claims?

In March this year, the US spy chief Tulsi Gabbard had informed Congress that there was no evidence Iran was building a nuclear weapon, and Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had not authorised the nuclear weapons programme that he had earlier suspended in 2003.

On June 17, as Israel and Iran continued to trade ballistic missiles, Trump was returning to Washington from the G7 summit in Canada, when he snubbed his own administration, including the spy chief Gabbard, saying she and the intel agencies had gotten it “wrong”.

He claimed that Iran was “very close” to having a nuclear weapon. On June 22, the US struck Iranian nuclear facilities. “The strikes were a spectacular military success,” Trump said in a televised address. “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.”

The next day, Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform, “The damage to the Nuclear sites in Iran is said to be ‘monumental.’ The hits were hard and accurate. Great skill was shown by our military. Thank you!”

On Wednesday, at the NATO summit, he reiterated his stance. “The last thing they [Iran] want to do is enrich anything right now… They’re not going to have a bomb and they’re not going to enrich,” he said at The Hague.

Top officials from his administration, including Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, have repeated the obliteration claims since then.

“Based on everything we have seen – and I’ve seen it all – our bombing campaign obliterated Iran’s ability to create nuclear weapons,” Hegseth said in a statement provided to Reuters.

“Our massive bombs hit exactly the right spot at each target – and worked perfectly. The impact of those bombs is buried under a mountain of rubble in Iran; so anyone who says the bombs were not devastating is just trying to undermine the President and the successful mission.”

How has Trump, the White House reacted?

Trump spent a good amount of time letting off steam on his Truth Social platform after the DIA report dropped.

“THE NUCLEAR SITES IN IRAN ARE COMPLETELY DESTROYED! BOTH THE TIMES AND CNN ARE GETTING SLAMMED BY THE PUBLIC!” Trump wrote in all-caps, referring to the reporting by The New York Times and CNN.

“FAKE NEWS CNN, TOGETHER WITH THE FAILING NEW YORK TIMES, HAVE TEAMED UP IN AN ATTEMPT TO DEMEAN ONE OF THE MOST SUCCESSFUL MILITARY STRIKES IN HISTORY,” Trump said in a post.

The US president also posted a series of apparently bizarre videos, including one of B-2 bombers taking off to a “bomb Iran” song in the background.

Trump is currently in the Netherlands, attending this week’s NATO summit, and reiterated to reporters that the damage from the strikes was significant. “I think it’s been completely demolished,” he said, adding, “Those pilots hit their targets. Those targets were obliterated, and the pilots should be given credit.

“That place is under rock. That place is demolished,” Trump responded to a question on the possibility of Iran rebuilding its nuclear program.

He took further shots at CNN, saying: “These cable networks are real losers. You’re gutless losers. I say that to CNN because I watch it – I have no choice. I got to watch it. It’s all garbage. It’s all fake news.”

He said the intelligence following the strikes in Iran was “inconclusive”. “The intelligence says we don’t know. It could’ve been very severe. That’s what the intelligence suggests.”

“It was very severe. There was obliteration,” he reiterated on Wednesday.

The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, called the DIA assessment “flat-out wrong” and leaked to the press “by an anonymous, low-level loser in the intelligence community”.

“The leaking of this alleged assessment is a clear attempt to demean President Trump, and discredit the brave fighter pilots who conducted a perfectly executed mission to obliterate Iran’s nuclear program,” she said in a statement. “Everyone knows what happens when you drop 14 30,000 pound bombs perfectly on their targets: Total obliteration.”

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Trump unleashes on ‘scum’ who leaked Iran bombing intel

Donald Trump unleashed on the “scum” who leaked intelligence suggesting his bunker busting raids on Iran’s nuclear facilities were not as effective as he declared.

During a press conference at the Nato summit in The Hague, Mr Trump said news outlets who published reports claiming the US had failed to wipe out Tehran’s nuclear programme had “maligned” the pilots who carried out the daring strikes.

The White House had spent the day pushing back on leaks from the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), which suggested Iran’s nuclear programme had not been destroyed but set back by only a few months.

Seven B-2 bombers flew from American soil to drop their massive bunker-busting bombs on the heavily fortified facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan during Operation Midnight Hammer on Saturday.

Mr Trump said the pilots involved “put their lives on the line,” adding: “but real scum, real scum, come out and write reports that are as negative as they could possibly be.

“It should be the opposite. You should make them heroes and heroines.”

The president also launched attacks on individual journalists in the room during the conference.

“Oh, fake news. CNN, yeah, here we go,” he said when speaking to Kaitlan Collins, the network’s chief White House correspondent.

His offhand comments triggered gasps and occasional titters from the room, which was packed with the world’s media.

At one point, Mr Trump grew heated when addressing the leaks, retreating from the stage mid-question and deploying his attack dog, Pete Hegseth, the defence secretary, to finish the answer.

Mr Hegseth described the bravery of pilots who went into action over Iran.

“And then the instinct, the instinct of CNN, the instinct of The New York Times, is to try to find a way to spin it for their own political reasons, to try to hurt president Trump or our country, they don’t care what the troops think,” he said, his face contorted into a sneer, teeth bared.

“They don’t care what the world thinks.”

He said the leaks had come from a very early, preliminary assessment that offered its conclusions with “low confidence.”

“So if you want to make an assessment of what happened at Fordow, you better get a big shovel and go really deep, because Iran’s nuclear programme is obliterated,” he said.

Both he and Mr Trump made the point that you did not need an assessment when Iran had simply capitulated.

“We’ve also spoken to people who have seen the site and the site is obliterated, and we think everything nuclear is down there,” he said. “They didn’t take it out.”

Security sources had said that early assessment concluded that Iran had removed nuclear material from its underground Fordow facility ahead of the weekend strikes.

CIA director John Ratcliffe released a statement on X on Wednesday night saying a body of “credible intelligence” indicated that Iran’s nuclear program had been “severely damaged” by the strikes.

“This includes new intelligence from a historically reliable and accurate source/method that several key Iranian nuclear facilities were destroyed and would have to be rebuilt over the course of years,” the statement said.

Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, said similar in a post on X.

Blaming the “propaganda media” for spreading false information, she said: “New intelligence confirms what [Donald Trump] has stated numerous times: Iran’s nuclear facilities have been destroyed. If the Iranians chose to rebuild, they would have to rebuild all three facilities (Natanz, Fordow, Esfahan) entirely, which would likely take years to do.

“The propaganda media has deployed their usual tactic: selectively release portions of illegally leaked classified intelligence assessments (intentionally leaving out the fact that the assessment was written with ‘low confidence’) to try to undermine President Trump’s decisive leadership and the brave servicemen and women who flawlessly executed a truly historic mission to keep the American people safe and secure.”

A report by DIA, leaked to CNN on Tuesday, said the airstrikes this weekend had failed to destroy Iran’s nuclear programme and only set it back by a few months.

The intelligence, which cast doubt on Mr Trump’s claim to have “completely and totally obliterated” the regime’s nuclear facilities, said the bombs failed to collapse underground buildings at the sites.

Officials told US media the centrifuges needed for nuclear enrichment to produce a bomb had been left largely intact, and that Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium had not been destroyed.

“The assessment is that the US set them back maybe a few months, tops,” one source said.

However, the administration and other authorities have pushed back on the report, an initial assessment produced just days after the attack.

The defence secretary has already launched a criminal probe into the leak.

A White House source said: “This person will be prosecuted for committing a felony, which is what this is.”

In an interview with Politico released on Wednesday, Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, said Iran’s nuclear programme had been “set behind significantly”, but did not give a specific timeframe.

“What you typically have is some who read it and then leaks it to the media, giving it the spin and the angle they want it to have because they’ve got some purpose: embarrass the administration,” he said.

Israeli intelligence was perplexed by the findings that American airstrikes had limited success against the Iranian nuclear sites, believing they caused “very significant” damage to the Fordow, Isfahan and Natanz facilities.

“Israeli intelligence services haven’t arrived at any bottom lines for now,” one official told Axios. “But we don’t think there was any bug in the operation, and we have indications the bunker-buster bombs didn’t work. Nobody here is disappointed”.

The White House also circulated an assessment from the Israel Atomic Energy Commission that claimed the Fordow strike “destroyed the site’s critical infrastructure and rendered the enrichment facility inoperable”.

It continued: “We assess that the American strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, combined with Israeli strikes on other elements of Iran’s nuclear programme, has set back Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons by many years”.

Mr Trump’s anger stood in contrast to his mood during much of the summit.

He had spent the night staying with King Willem-Alexander, Queen Maxima at their palace in The Hague. “Beautiful, beautiful people,” he said before using his highest praise. “Central casting.”

Organisers had gone out of their way to trim the schedule and create a Trump-friendly communiqué that minimised any chance of fireworks. It worked.

In 2019 Mr Trump left early when other world leaders were caught on camera ridiculing him and in 2018 he scrapped meetings and reportedly threatened to withdraw from Nato altogether if members did not raise spending.

This time he made it to the end and secured commitments from members that they would step up and contribute more.

He also arrived with good news to share. There was peace between Iran and Israel after his bombers had delivered their payload to sites at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan.

“No other military on Earth could have done it,” he said, using his press conference for a victory lap. “And now this incredible exercise of American strength has paved the way for peace with a historic ceasefire agreement late Monday, and we call it the 12-day war.”

Organisers made sure that Ukraine was lower down the agenda, although Mr Trump met Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukrainian president, on Thursday.

He was asked again about his campaign promise to end the war on his first day in office.

“It’s more difficult than people would have any idea,” he said. “Vladimir Putin has been more difficult.”

Mr Trump added: “Frankly, I had some problems with Zelensky. You may have read about him, and it’s been more difficult than other wars.”

Mr Trump has cooled on the Russian president in recent weeks, talking more often now about how he is getting in the way of peace. However, he has not signed on to European plans for tougher sanctions on Moscow.

The meeting with Mr Zelensky took a different format to other sessions. There was no opportunity at the start for reporters to ask questions.

The White House gave no official reason but it was the presence of cameras and reporters that triggered such a public row between the two men in the Oval Office in February.

Mr Trump said they did not discuss a ceasefire.

“I wanted to know how he’s doing,” he told reporters. “It was very nice, actually. You know, we had little rough times. He couldn’t have been nicer.”

Overall, Mr Trump said he left the summit with a warmer view of Nato.

“It was great, and I left here differently,” he said. “I left here saying that these people really love their countries. It’s not a rip off.”