Lt. General Jeffrey Kruse has been ousted as Defense Intelligence Agency director, a senior defense official confirmed Friday.
“Lt Gen Kruse will no longer serve as DIA Director,” the official said in a brief statement.
The agency’s deputy director, Christine Bordine, will assume the role of acting DIA director, a spokesperson said.
Intelligence committee leaders in Congress were informed about the DIA chief’s firing, according to a source familiar with the notification, but were given no reason for it.
Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, who is the vice chair of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, said in a statement, “The firing of yet another senior national security official underscores the Trump administration’s dangerous habit of treating intelligence as a loyalty test rather than a safeguard for our country.”
The DIA was the department responsible for the preliminary assessment of the military strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities. The assessment said that the strikes had set back Tehran’s nuclear program by a matter of months, three sources familiar with its contents told CBS news shortly after the airstrikes.
The DIA’s findings also indicated some of Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile had been moved before the strikes, according to one of the sources.
That assessment prompted a backlash from the Trump administration, since President Trump had said in an address to the nation following the strikes that “Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.” He said the U.S. strikes had set back the Iranian nuclear program “basically decades.”
DIA employees seem to have been caught completely off guard by Kruse’s firing. One DIA employee told CBS News of speaking to another colleague about it who replied with an expletive.
Another said, “If he is being fired, the workplace at large will lose even more faith in the administration. There’s already widespread — and openly voiced in town halls — concern of their work being politicized.”
Two other military officials have been removed from their posts, CBS News confirmed on Friday. Rear Adm. Milton Sands, who served as commander of Navy Special Warfare Command, and Vice Adm. Nancy Lacore, who was the chief of the Navy Reserve, will no longer serve in those roles, according to a Navy official.
Neither Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, nor U.S. Special Operations Commanding Gen. Bryan Fenton, were consulted on the decision to fire Lacore or Sands, sources familiar with the matter told CBS News Saturday.
Major Gen. J. Patrick Work, commanding general of the 82nd Airborne Division, was also recently pulled from a future role as deputy commander of U.S. Central Command as well, sources familiar told CBS News.
The Washington Post was first to report on Sands’ and Lacore’s removals.