Three U.S. officials told Reuters that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has dismissed the head of the Pentagon’s intelligence agency and two other senior military commanders, in what is the latest move by President Donald Trump’s administration to remove officials from the Pentagon.
It was not immediately clear why Lieutenant General Jeffrey Kruse, who led the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), was fired. The dismissals broadened later on Friday.
One U.S. official, who spoke anonymously to Reuters, stated that in addition to Kruse, Hegseth had also ordered the removal of the chief of U.S. Naval Reserves and the commander of Naval Special Warfare Command. All three officials said they did not know why they were let go.
“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,” said U.S. Senator Mark Warner, vice chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
The Washington Post was the first to report the firing.
This action appears to be the most recent attempt by the Trump administration to penalize current and former military, intelligence, and law enforcement officials whose views have been seen as conflicting with Trump’s.
In April, Trump fired General Timothy Haugh as director of the National Security Agency, as part of a sweep that included more than a dozen staff at the White House National Security Council.
Hegseth has also targeted uniformed military officials at the Pentagon. In February, he fired Air Force General CQ Brown, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was dismissed along with five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of U.S. military leadership.
The chief of the U.S. Air Force also made a surprise announcement on Monday that he planned to retire halfway through his tenure.
While the exact reason for Kruse’s dismissal was unclear, it followed the leak of a preliminary DIA assessment to the news media. This assessment said that U.S. airstrikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities on June 22 had only set back Tehran’s program by a few months, a finding that contradicted Trump’s claim that the targets were “obliterated.”
The leak of this assessment, which Reuters also reported on, enraged Trump. The White House denounced the top-secret report as “flat out wrong,” and Trump attacked CNN, The New York Times, and other outlets that obtained it, calling them “scum” and “FAKE NEWS.”
The Trump administration has been conducting a broad purge of U.S. military, intelligence officers, and diplomats, which it says is part of an effort to reduce the size of the federal government, cut the budget, and punish what it describes as the “politicization or weaponization” of intelligence.
The news of Kruse’s firing came two days after Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard announced that, on Trump’s orders, she was revoking the security clearances of 37 current and former U.S. intelligence professionals.
This week’s revocations were just the latest in a series of such actions during Trump’s second term. They have included Biden, who defeated Trump in the 2020 election, and former Vice President Kamala Harris, who lost last year’s vote.
Earlier this week, Gabbard also announced the first major overhaul of her office since its creation, cutting personnel by over 40% by October 1 and saving more than $700 million annually.
