WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse, the head of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, on Friday, according to White House and Pentagon officials, making him another in a raft of senior officers who have been removed under Hegseth’s watch.
The firing follows a controversial initial assessment by the agency in June indicating strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities had limited effect, seemingly contradicting President Donald Trump’s claim at the time that they had been “obliterated.”
Pentagon and White House officials issued brief statements which did not provide any rationale for the firing, but said Kruse “will no longer serve as DIA Director.” The DIA did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Kruse’s firing was first reported by the Washington Post.
Administration officials gave no other reason for the firing of Kruse, who had been in the job since February 2024 and would normally be expected to serve until 2027. Congressional officials also confirmed the firing and said they were told it was for a “lack of confidence,” a bland expression the military often uses to cover any number of reasons someone was removed.
Kruse joins a growing list of senior generals and admirals fired under Hegseth, including the previous chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the general who headed the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command, the Navy’s top admiral and the head of the U.S. Coast Guard. Earlier this week, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin announced unexpectedly that he would be retiring in November, about two years earlier than the usual four years for a service chief.
Immediately following the strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities in June, the DIA completed an initial, classified assessment of the damage from the operation. That assessment was marked as “low confidence” because it came only about 24 hours after those strikes. But it indicated Iran’s nuclear program had been set back several months, according to three individuals with knowledge of the report, NBC News reported at the time. That was at odds with Trump, who remarked immediately after the strikes that the nuclear sites had been “totally obliterated.”
The disclosure of the DIA assessment led to a sharp pushback from Trump’s White House, with officials complaining that the report had been leaked. Days later, Hegseth spoke to the media.
“It was preliminary, a day and a half after the actual strike, when it admits itself in writing that it requires weeks to accumulate the necessary data to make such an assessment,” Hegseth told reporters in the Pentagon. “It points out that it’s not been coordinated with the intelligence community at all, there’s low confidence in this particular report.”
