US defence secretary Pete Hegseth has fired the Pentagon’s intelligence agency chief, just weeks after a White House rebuke of a review assessing the impact of American strikes on Iran.
Lt Gen Jeffery Kruse will no longer serve as head of US Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Pentagon said in a statement. Two other senior military commanders have also been ousted by the Pentagon.
The defence department has not offered any immediate explanation on the firings.
In June, President Donald Trump had pushed back strongly on a leaked DIA report that found that attacks on Iran had only set back its nuclear programme by months. The White House declared the agency’s assessment “flat out wrong”.
Trump had declared the nuclear sites in Iran “completely destroyed”, and had accused the media of “an attempt to demean one of the most successful military strikes in history”.
Speaking at the Nato summit at the time, Hegseth had said that the report was made on “low intelligence” and that the FBI was probing the leak.
Kruse’s exit was first reported by the Washington Post.
The DIA is part of the Pentagon and specialises in military intelligence to support operations. It collects large amounts of technical intelligence, but is distinct from other agencies like the CIA.
It is understood that Hegseth had also ordered the removal of the chief of US Naval reserves and the commander of Naval Special Warfare Command, an anonymous source told Reuters on Friday.
In a statement, US Senator Mark Warner warned that Kruse’s sacking was a sign that Trump had a “dangerous habit of treating intelligence as a loyalty test rather than a safeguard for our country”.
Trump has removed a number of officials whose analysis have been seen to be at odds with the president.
In July, Trump said that he had ordered his team to dismiss Commissioner of Labor Statistics Erika McEntarfer “immediately”, after a report showed that job growth had slowed.
And in April, Trump fired General Timothy Haugh as director of the National Security Agency, along with more than a dozen staff at the White House national security council.
Hegseth has also pushed out a number of military officials at the Pentagon. In February, he fired Air Force General C Q Brown, who was dismissed along with five other admirals and generals.
Source: BBC
