Exclusive: US military hasn’t conducted standard review of intelligence tied to strike on school in Iran, sources say
By Zachary Cohen, CNN
(CNN) — The investigation into a US strike that hit a school in Iran has sat for months with a military command while leaders have held off on ordering a critical, standard intelligence review to help determine what happened, according to three sources familiar with the matter.
Within a week of the strike, the first two stages of a “battle damage assessment” focused on answering basic questions including whether the strike hit and damaged the intended target had been completed, indicating that the US was responsible for striking the Shajareh Tayyiba school in Minab, the sources said.
But a third standard review stage, a step where analysts – typically from the Defense Intelligence Agency – review the entire body of relevant satellite imagery and other intelligence sources to provide a more holistic determination about what took place and how a strike impacted the broader mission, was not ordered, the sources said. That review would almost always be conducted in the immediate aftermath of a noteworthy strike, they said, but it had not begun as of early July.
An independent investigation – announced in March – was separately launched, and interviews were conducted with service members involved with the strike. Sources said that the information gained from interviews, material that could be useful to commanders still launching strikes against Iran to avoid mistakes, has been “locked down” by US Central Command with only a handful of officers permitted access to the details.
“There was no detailed analysis conducted and CENTCOM locked down the investigation/blocked anyone from looking into it,” one of the sources said.
A Defense Department official told CNN that “the investigation is ongoing.”
“We have nothing further to announce at this moment,” the official added.
The sources said the investigation would help determine fault for the mistaken strike.
The decision to launch the investigation should not have precluded DIA from conducting the more thorough third phase of the review, the first source told CNN, adding “both could have happened at the same time if they chose to.”
An additional DIA review would not, in and of itself, have determined who was at fault but could have been used as evidence, the source added.
A US official told CNN that the internal Pentagon investigation was intended to supersede a traditional third phase assessment, and both could not happen at the same time because it was clear after the initial review that the incident required a thorough probe – by an independent body outside of CENTCOM and unattached to other agencies that would have had a role in the strike itself.
Once the independent investigation findings were submitted to CENTCOM back in April, the subsequent delay was due to a need to examine what happened even further, the official said, pointing to the fact that the failures contributing to the accidental strike went back years and involved multiple layers of potential missteps.
A week after the strike and after the initial two phases of review, evidence was already beginning to emerge that the US military had accidentally hit the elementary school due, at least in part, to outdated intelligence about the targeted site – which was believed to be an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps naval base, sources said.
Iranian state media said that 168 children and 14 adults died in the attack.
As of early July, the Pentagon had not asked the Defense Intelligence Agency to conduct the third and final phase of the battle damage assessment, a role the agency almost always fulfills, the sources said. DIA had been asked to participate in the initial, more surface-level review, they said.
The US military would have likely benefitted from a more thorough analysis of the strike in question on several fronts, particularly given the apparent missteps that led to the use of outdated intelligence and broader gaps within the Pentagon’s targeting database that appear to have directly contributed to the mistake.
CNN previously reported that senior US military commanders bypassed warnings in critical databases that intelligence about potential targets in Iran was severely out of date and went ahead with approving strikes – including one that hit the school.
The decision by senior commanders to ignore the warnings was made for “expediency,” two of the sources said, in a rush to provide targets at the start of the war. It also directly contributed to the accidental strike on the school, the sources added.
But the lack of a full review of the intelligence is unprecedented for a noteworthy strike, the sources said.
“The Pentagon was in damage control,” the first source told CNN, adding that senior leaders at both the Pentagon and CENTCOM did not want a repeat of what occurred roughly one year prior when CNN reported that a Defense Intelligence Agency assessment of US strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities showed they had not “obliterated” the regime’s capabilities – undermining President Donald Trump’s public claims to the contrary.
That assessment, which derived from a phase three BDA analysis, outraged the White House and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
DIA undertook the nuclear sites review without an express request from CENTCOM, a source said, as DIA had assumed it would fulfill its traditional role of completing the in-depth analysis. Once the analysis became the subject of press attention for undermining Trump’s descriptions of effectiveness, Hegseth and the White House became upset with DIA leadership, the source said.
Then-DIA director Gen. Jeffrey Kruse was subsequently fired from his role.
Top Pentagon officials have previously said the internal Pentagon probe into the strike that hit the school was handed over to a US general officer outside of CENTCOM for independent review. That official has not been named. Lawmakers in Congress have said the official submitted an initial version of the investigative report in April, but CENTCOM has held onto the report since then.
The delay in completing the investigation has fueled outrage from lawmakers on Capitol Hill who have not yet seen the investigative reports despite repeatedly demanding the Pentagon turn over all relevant materials.
“More than four months after the strike, and after the reported submission of the investigation in April, Congress and the American people still have not received the Department’s investigation and findings. There is no justification for withholding an unclassified accounting of what happened, what went wrong, and what the Department is doing to prevent recurrence,” some two dozen Democratic senators wrote in a recent letter to Hegseth and CENTCOM commander Adm. Brad Cooper, demanding information about the investigation.
With intense pressure on Hegseth and Cooper from the White House to prove that the Iran war has gone well, both have resisted sharing information related to the conflict with other parts of military and the intelligence community, a separate US official told CNN.
The Pentagon and CENTCOM have increasingly used classification powers typically reserved for highly sensitive information to restrict access to even basic information and planning details that had typically been shared widely among the service branches to coordinate operations, the sources said.
“I’ve never seen it used on stuff like this,” one of the sources added. “One of the reasons the US military is as effective as it is, is because we work pretty well together … When you keep siloing us away from each other, we don’t amplify each other’s strengths and cover each other’s weaknesses. And you only do that if you’re bizarrely paranoid that we won’t follow your orders, or you don’t trust us,”
Asked again this week if he would commit to release the findings of the investigation, Trump demurred, telling Fox News in an interview, “I’ll have to speak to the generals … I don’t think anybody is ever going to be able to say what happened there.”
“I don’t think there can be a conclusive report,” Trump added when pressed on whether he would release the investigation, before repeating, “I don’t know, I’d have to ask the military people.”
Trump acknowledged “it is possible” that the use of old intelligence or a mistake made by US forces during a very active point in the war may have led to the incident, but he also cast doubt on the veracity of publicly available evidence – suggesting that satellite imagery showing fragments of an American missile at the site could be “AI generated” without providing evidence to support that claim.
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CNN’s Haley Britzky contributed to this report.
