U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired the head of the Pentagon’s intelligence agency and two other senior military commanders, three U.S. officials told Reuters on Friday, the latest move by President Donald Trump’s administration to purge officials at the Pentagon.
It was not immediately clear why Lieutenant General Jeffrey Kruse, who led the Defense Intelligence Agency, was fired.
Hegseth’s purge broadened later on Friday. One U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told Reuters 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 it was unknown why they were fired.
“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, who is the vice chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
The firing was first reported by the Washington Post.
LATEST FIRING
The move appeared to be the latest attempt by the Trump administration to penalize current and former military, intelligence and law enforcement officials whose views have been seen as at odds with Trump.
In April, Trump fired General Timothy Haugh as director of the National Security Agency, in a purge that included more than a dozen staff at the White House national security council.
Hegseth has also gone after uniformed military officials at the Pentagon. In February, he fired Air Force General C.Q. Brown, 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 made a surprise announcement on Monday that he planned to retire only halfway through his tenure.
While it was not clear exactly why Kruse was fired, it comes after a preliminary DIA assessment leaked to the news media that said the June 22 U.S. airstrikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities had set Tehran’s program back only a few months, a finding contradicting Trump’s claim that the targets were “obliterated.”
The leaking of the assessment, which Reuters also reported, enraged Trump. The White House denounced the top-secret assessment as “flat out wrong,” and Trump attacked CNN, the New York Times and other outlets that obtained the report, calling them “scum” and “FAKE NEWS.”
The Trump administration has conducted a sweeping purge of U.S. military and intelligence officers and diplomats that it says is part of an effort to slash the size of the U.S. government, shrinking the federal budget and punishing what it describes as the “politicization or weaponization” of intelligence.
