On the morning of August 30, President Donald Trump was receiving a daily intelligence briefing from a group of senior national security officials, including CIA Director Gina Haspel.
U.S. officials at the meeting were happy. Iran had attempted to launch a satellite into space the previous day, but the rocket exploded on the launch pad.
Satellite images of the failed rocket launch show extensive damage to the site, which was included in the morning briefings.
The president was shown the image. A former Trump administration official said that Trump asked if he could keep it. The intelligence briefer said yes after some hesitation.
The former official who attended the meeting said that officials were worried about leaving the image with the president. Gina and other intelligence officials may have told her not to show it to anyone. I think he blew them off. He said he wanted to look at the picture.
The picture was posted by Trump about an hour later.
In June 2020. The images were taken byChip Somodevilla.
The officials were worried that the image would give Iran a leg up in concealing its nuclear and missile programs. The US and Iran are in indirect negotiations over the future of the 2015 nuclear deal, which the Trump administration withdrew from in the fall of 2018, and Iran is preparing for another satellite launch.
Michael Mulroy, who served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East, said that any effort the U.S. or our allies are taking to disrupt or monitor Iranian satellite launches should have been kept secret.
The same technology used to propel satellites into space can be used to develop missiles, so top U.S. officials kept a close eye on these launches, worried that Tehran was aiming to develop weapons that could strike anywhere on Earth.
Mulroy says that Iran is closer to a nuclear weapon than it was before. They could have one in a matter of months. Their efforts to develop a delivery system are even more important.
During the Trump presidency, it was difficult for officials to get the president's attention. In his account of his time in the Trump administration, the former US ambassador to the UN wrote that it was simply not something he could get Trump to focus on.
One thing is certain, President Trump's decision to release a classified image was not conventional. The photo couldn't be attached to a digitally-generated message since the electronic devices used to access the intelligence briefs are not on the open Internet. A former Trump administration official said that Trump had an aide take a photo of the daily brief and post it online.
Trump's move seemed to mock the Iranians and raise the specter of U.S. sabotage. The United States of America was not involved in the catastrophic accident during final launch preparations for the Safir SLV Launch. I wish Iran good luck in determining what happened at Site One, he said in the text that accompanied the image.
The decision to release this image from a U.S. spy satellite was likely unprecedented, according to former officials. Academic analysts used commercially available imagery to expose the failed launch before the president did.
The assistant secretary of defense for international security assistance was Michael Mulroy. The U.S. Army has a picture of Monica King.
Although the U.S. spy satellites' orbital paths are widely known, images from them are classified as they reveal the satellites' precise resolution capabilities, which are superior to commercially available technology.
The former Trump administration official said that a senior intelligence official called him after the president released the image and asked what was going on at the White House.
A former senior official at the NRO said that the image was stupid and damaging.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not return calls.
The president's decision was different from what some Trump-era officials recall.
A former senior White House official who also attended the meeting said that Trump brought up publishing the image. The former official said that the intelligence officials didn't blow a gasket over the idea. The image was only classified as a secret level.
The United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket is going to be launched in 2020. Joe Skipper is a reporter for the Associated Press.
Multiple Trump administration officials say that the Pentagon and top intelligence community did not object to the release of the photo. A former senior intelligence official said there was no angst about releasing the photo.
The former senior White House official says that it wasn't a crown jewel. The picture the president released wasn't much better than what was widely available because of advances in commercially available satellite imagery.
The former senior NRO official says not so. This former official said that the image Trump released was classified as the highest level of secret. According to former officials, the image was taken by a KH-11 series satellite, which is among the most sensitive employed by the U.S. intelligence community.
The former senior NRO official estimated the damage at billions. The former senior NRO official said that the Iranians gave the Americans a gift that they know about. The official said that they saw the resolution of the satellite.
The officials at the NRO were worried about what their platforms might be missing since Iran and other U.S. adversaries would likely change their behavior. The former official said that it degraded their confidence in the ability to pick up things.
The 40th anniversary of the Iran hostage crisis is marked by protesters outside the former U.S. Embassy. Atta Kenare is pictured.
Jeffrey Lewis, a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies and expert on satellite imagery, says that the U.S. spy satellite resolution capabilities are three times better than the best commercially available imagery. It was an order of magnitude better than thematically.
Lewis found the image very useful. He says the image was a "gold mine" and he learned a lot.
Lewis believes that the release of the image had an impact on intelligence communities around the world.
Lewis says he doesn't want to exaggerate how bad it was. It is not that the satellites stopped working. It is just that it helps countries deceive those satellites.
Lewis says that Iran has introduced new measures to make satellite-based analysis of their launch activities more difficult, which he attributes to a mix of what the Iranians learned from the image released by Trump, as well as the increased public scrutiny from open source analysts like him. Lewis says it's hard to disentangle what caused the change in Iranian behavior.
Some officials in the Trump administration dismissed the concerns about revealing the image.
A former senior administration official said that he heard whines and whimpers from the intelligence community about the image. I didn't see any change in spy satellite capabilities, or nobody gave me a convincing case of why that mattered.
The former intelligence official said it was due to the NRO's concerns. The former official said that the NRO thinks any satellite imagery that is ever released anywhere is a big deal.
Donald Trump held a rally in Dallas. Tom Pennington is the photographer.
The former senior NRO official said that officials were too intimidated to speak up.
The former official said that he was almost afraid to bring the weight of the president onto NRO. NRO wanted to be left alone.
The former senior White House official said that the president's actions were calculated. The former official said that Trump said that he would get inside the Iranians' head if the explosion on the launchpad was an accident or not. He was pretty sure he was going to do it.
The explosion was not the result of U.S. covert action. He said that the missile blew up, not anything they did to it.
The former senior administration official said that the Iranians are accident prone because they don't have the funds to maintain their space program. There are things that happen by mistake.
Some people were not sure if the explosion was accidental. A former senior Pentagon official said there was a lot of heartburn over the message. If you have had success with covert action, you need to keep it covert. That is what made it a success.
