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 set back its nuclear programme by months only. The White House declared the agency’s assessment “flat out wrong”.
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.
