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WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has fired a general whose agency’s initial intelligence assessment of U.S. damage to Iranian nuclear sites angered President Trump, according to two people familiar with the decision and a White House official.

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse will no longer serve as head of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, according to the people, who spoke Friday on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly.

Hegseth also fired Vice Adm. Nancy Lacore, chief of the Navy Reserve, and Rear Adm. Milton Sands, a Navy SEAL officer who oversees Naval Special Warfare Command, another U.S. official said.

No reasons were given for their firings, the latest in a series of steps targeting military leaders, intelligence officials and other perceived critics of Trump, who has demanded loyalty across the government. The administration also stripped security clearances this week from additional current and former national security officials.

Taken together, the moves could chill dissent and send a signal against reaching conclusions at odds with Trump’s interests.

Agency’s assessment contradicted Trump

Kruse’s firing comes two months after details of a preliminary assessment of U.S. airstrikes against Iran leaked to the media. It found that Iran’s nuclear program had been set back only a few months by the military bombardment, contradicting assertions from Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The president, who had pronounced the Iranian program “completely and fully obliterated,” rejected the report. His oft-repeated criticism of the DIA analysis built on his long-running distrust of intelligence assessments, including one published in 2017 that said Russia interfered on his behalf in the 2016 election.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence — which is responsible for coordinating the work of 18 intelligence agencies, including the DIA — has been declassifying years-old documents meant to cast doubt on those previous findings, which have been endorsed by bipartisan congressional committees.

After the June strikes on three Iranian nuclear sites, Hegseth lambasted the press for focusing on the preliminary assessment but did not offer any direct evidence of the destruction of the facilities.

“You want to call it destroyed, you want to call it defeated, you want to call it obliterated — choose your word. This was a historically successful attack,” Hegseth said at a news conference at the time.

Democrats raise concerns

While the Pentagon has offered no details on the firings, Democrats in Congress have raised alarm over the precedent that Kruse’s ouster sets for the intelligence community.

“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 Sen. Mark R. Warner of Virginia, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, called on the administration to show why Kruse was fired, or “otherwise, we can only assume that this is another politically motivated decision intended to create an atmosphere of fear” within the intelligence community.

Trump has a history of removing government officials whose data and analysis he disagrees with. Earlier this month, after a lousy jobs report, he fired the official in charge of the data. His administration also has stopped posting reports on climate change, canceled studies on vaccine access and removed data on gender identity from government sites.

Other military and intelligence changes

The new firings culminate a week of broad Trump administration changes to the intelligence community and new shake-ups to military leadership.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced this week that it would slash its staff and budget and revoked more security clearances, a tactic the administration uses against those it sees as foes. The Pentagon also said the Air Force’s top uniformed officer, Gen. David Allvin, planned to retire two years early.

Hegseth and Trump have been aggressive in dismissing top military officials, often without formal explanation.

The administration has fired Air Force Gen. CQ Brown Jr. as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as the Navy’s top officer, the Air Force’s second-highest-ranking officer and the top lawyers for three military service branches.

In April, Hegseth dismissed Gen. Tim Haugh as head of the National Security Agency and Vice Adm. Shoshana Chatfield, who was a senior official at NATO.

No public explanations have been offered by the Pentagon for any of the firings, though some of the officers were believed by the administration to endorse diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Trump has demanded government agencies purge DEI efforts.

The ousters of Kruse, Lacore and Sands were reported earlier by the Washington Post.

Toropin, Jalonick and Price write for the Associated Press.

The IAEA is yet to make a statement about the meeting, which will not include a visit to Iranian nuclear sites.

Iran’s talks with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will be “technical” and “complicated”, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has said, ahead of a visit by the United Nations nuclear watchdog for the first time since Tehran cut ties with it last month in the wake of the June conflict triggered by Israeli strikes.

Esmaeil Baghaei, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson, told reporters on Monday that a meeting may be organised with Minister of Foreign Affairs Abbas Araghchi during the IAEA’s visit, “but it is a bit soon to predict what the talks will result since these are technical talks, complicated talks”.

The IAEA’s visit marks the first to Iran since President Masoud Pezeshkian ordered the country on July 3 to suspend its cooperation with the nuclear watchdog after an intensive 12-day war with Israel. The conflict also saw the United States launch massive strikes on Israel’s behalf against key Iranian nuclear sites.

Pezeshkian told Al Jazeera in an interview last month that his country is prepared for any future war Israel might wage against it, adding that he was not optimistic about the ceasefire between the countries. He confirmed that Tehran is committed to continuing its nuclear programme for peaceful purposes.

He added that Israel’s strikes, which assassinated leading military figures and nuclear scientists, damaged nuclear facilities and killed hundreds of civilians, had sought to “eliminate” Iran’s hierarchy, but “completely failed to do so”.

Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi told Iran’s state-run IRNA news agency on Monday that Massimo Aparo, the IAEA’s deputy director general and head of safeguards, had left Iran. Aparo met with an Iranian delegation, which included officials from the Foreign Ministry and the IAEA, to discuss “the method of interaction between the agency and Iran”.

Gharibabadi said they decided to continue consultations in the future, without providing further details.

The IAEA did not immediately issue a statement about Aparo’s visit, which will not include any planned access to Iranian nuclear sites.

Relations between the IAEA and Iran deteriorated after the watchdog’s board said on June 12 that Iran had breached its non-proliferation obligations, a day before Israel’s air strikes over Iran, which sparked the conflict.

Baghaei, meanwhile, criticised the IAEA’s lack of response to the Israeli strikes.

“Peaceful facilities of a country that was under 24-hour monitoring were the target of strikes, and the agency refrained from showing a wise and rational reaction and did not condemn it as it was required,” he said.

Araghchi had previously said that cooperation with the agency, which will now require approval by Iran’s highest security body, the Supreme National Security Council, would be about redefining how both sides cooperate. The decision will likely further limit inspectors’ ability to track Tehran’s programme that had been enriching uranium to near weapons-grade levels.

Iran has had limited IAEA inspections in the past, in negotiations with the West, and it is unclear how soon talks between Tehran and Washington for a deal over its nuclear programme will resume, if at all.

US intelligence agencies and the IAEA assessed that Iran last had an organised nuclear weapons programme in 2003. Although Tehran had been enriching uranium up to 60 percent, this is still some way from the weapons-grade levels of 90 percent.