It isn’t the country’s highest profile intelligence agency, but the Pentagon has its own department focused on intelligence gathering and assessment. It’s called the Defense Intelligence Agency, and its principal responsibility is collecting information on foreign militaries’ plans and capabilities.
If the name sounds at all familiar, it’s because the DIA recently generated quite a bit of attention. Earlier this summer, Donald Trump ordered a preemptive military strike against nuclear targets in Iran, and it was a preliminary assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency that found the airstrikes were less effective than the president claimed.
The White House desperately wanted the American public to believe the Iranian program had been “obliterated,” but the information collected by the DIA suggested the political talking points simply weren’t true.
Two months later, the head of the DIA is apparently out of a job. The Washington Post reported:
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has fired Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the latest senior military or intelligence officer to lose his position in a wider purge of national security agencies’ top ranks, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The Post’s report, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, added that the Cabinet secretary “didn’t immediately cite a reason for the dismissal other than ‘loss of confidence,’ a catchall term Hegseth has used to justify the sacking of other senior military officers this year.”
That Kruse was apparently ousted on the heels of sharing inconvenient intelligence that contradicted what the president wanted to hear sends a dangerous signal to other officials across other agencies: produce intelligence that makes Trump happy, or else.
It comes against a backdrop of a larger offensive against the U.S. intelligence community. Just as notably, it’s the latest evidence of Hegseth’s ongoing Pentagon purge. Indeed, it comes just days after Gen. David Allvin, the chief of staff of the Air Force, was also shown the door.
The broader purge also includes Air Force Gen. Timothy Haugh, who was both the head of U.S. Cyber Command and the director of the National Security Agency; Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Gen. James Slife, former vice chief of staff of the Air Force; Adm. Linda Fagan, the commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard; Adm. Lisa Franchetti; Lt. Gen. Jennifer Short; Lt. Gen. Joseph B. Berger III, the Army’s top military lawyer; Lt. Gen. Charles Plummer, the Air Force’s top military lawyer; and Navy Vice Adm. Shoshana Chatfield, the only woman on NATO’s military committee.
Earlier this year, five former defense secretaries — including retired Gen. Jim Mattis, Trump’s first defense secretary — condemned the firings as “reckless.” Their joint letter, addressed to Congress, asked that the House and the Senate hold “immediate hearings to assess the national security implications” of the dismissals.
Hegseth and the administration appear to have ignored the concerns, the purge is ongoing, and GOP leaders on Capitol Hill have scheduled no such hearings.
Democratic Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, who served as a Marine officer in Iraq and who now serves on the House Armed Services Committee, recently spoke to Politico about Hegseth’s purges, which the congressman described as politically motivated.
“That’s a recipe not just for a politicized military, but an authoritarian military,” Moulton said. “That’s the way militaries work in Russia and China and North Korea.”
The Massachusetts Democrat made those comments in May. The problem is worse now.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
