Iran inflicted billions in damage to U.S. intelligence sites, sources say

[u/John3262005]

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/iran-inflicted-billions-damage-us-intelligence-sites-sources-say-rcna591879

Iranian missile and drone attacks have inflicted damage on U.S. intelligence posts and surveillance hardware in the Middle East that is more extensive than any destruction America’s spy agencies have endured and will cost billions of dollars to repair, according to four people with knowledge of the matter.

The Iranian strikes have forced Congress to find funds to restore the targeted facilities and prompted officials to weigh how to deploy personnel and intelligence resources in a region now facing a heightened threat from Tehran’s drone and missile arsenal, two of the people said.

Iran’s air attacks also have raised questions about why the Defense Department, the intelligence community and the State Department were not better prepared to defend government facilities from drone and missile strikes, military experts and former U.S. officials said.

The CIA and the White House did not respond to requests for comment. The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

NBC News previously reported on the extensive damage suffered at American military bases by Iranian drone and missile strikes since the U.S. and Israel launched a war with Iran in February. At the time, a Pentagon official said that the department would not discuss battle damage assessments and that U.S. forces remained fully operational. That posture hasn’t changed.

But the aerial onslaught also has taken a toll on U.S. intelligence sites and equipment, some of which is shared with the American military, according to the four people familiar with the matter.

The sources would not share the precise cost of the destructive attacks, but they said the price tag amounts to billions of dollars. They said the damage done by the Iranian attacks is unprecedented for the CIA and other intelligence agencies, which have not been exposed to such an acute aerial threat for decades.

Since its creation in 1947, the CIA is not publicly known to have faced repeated aerial attacks on agency sites and hardware as it has in the current conflict with Iran. In previous U.S. wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, American adversaries lacked the ability to carry out regular air raids on U.S. military and intelligence posts. In 1968, North Vietnam once sent biplanes to attack a U.S. radar site in Laos used by the U.S. military and the CIA. The attack was thwarted, but North Vietnamese forces eventually destroyed the site in a ground attack.

The CIA has offices on embassy compounds, known as stations, in more than a dozen countries in the Middle East and other sites around the world that are used for logistics and intelligence gathering. Other American spy agencies also have hardware or shared equipment with the U.S. military to monitor electronic communications by adversaries.

In March, Iranian drones struck the CIA station in the Saudi capital of Riyadh, NBC News reported, citing a U.S. official and a Persian Gulf official. A U.S. intelligence site in the Sulaymaniyah province in eastern Iraq was hit early in the war, as well, two of the people with knowledge of the matter said.

Iranian drone and missile salvos hit other sensitive sites and equipment across the region, these people said. They said that in some cases, the strikes hit radar or other surveillance equipment used by both the U.S. military and intelligence agencies.

NBC News has reported that the Trump administration has asked private satellite companies, including Planet Labs, to withhold imagery of U.S. military bases in the region from the public, making the extent of the destruction from the Iranian strikes difficult to gauge.

Iran has carried out more than 2,000 missile, drone and air strikes in the war, striking at least 20 U.S. government sites in eight countries. As of May, Iran had damaged or destroyed more than 42 U.S. military aircraft. And the regime has received satellite surveillance imagery from both Russia and China and electronics intelligence from Russia during the conflict, helping the regime target U.S. forces, NBC News previously reported.

Although the vast majority of Iranian missiles and drones targeting U.S. bases have been shot down by U.S. air defenses, a significant number of drones have slipped through and caused much of the damage, according to former U.S. officials and military experts who also have knowledge of the attacks.

For the past 4 1/2 years, the war in Ukraine has underscored how drones have transformed warfare and exposed vulnerabilities in modern air defense systems. To counter Russian aerial attacks, Ukraine has installed weapons depots and arms plants underground and taken other measures to harden its defenses and jam incoming drones.

But the U.S. failed to adapt to the new threat at its bases and embassies across the Middle East, as well as in Asia, according to Seth Jones, president of the defense and security department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank.

“The U.S. walked into this war and had not sufficiently thought through base defense in any way, shape or form,” Jones said. “And we got hammered.”