On the menu today: Multiple U.S. and U.K. media sources reported Wednesday that President Trump had approved plans for American military forces to attack Iran but was holding off to see if Iran would give up its nuclear program. Earlier in the day, Trump said, “I’ve had it, I give up, no more. Then we go blow up all the nuclear stuff that’s all over the place there. They had bad intentions.” The Economist gives the world a better look at the Israeli intelligence that spurred its airstrikes against Iran, and the Mossad reportedly pulled off the old, “Wait, I didn’t call this meeting, I thought you called this meeting” trick. Finally, are there Chinese cargo planes flying into Iran during this conflict? Or is this just errors in flight tracking data?
Schrödinger’s War Order
The big news of Wednesday, reported in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere: “President Trump told senior aides late Tuesday that he approved of attack plans for Iran, but was holding off to see if Tehran would abandon its nuclear program, people familiar with the deliberations said.” This feels like a strategic leak to reinforce to the Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei that he faces the choice of giving up his country’s nuclear weapons program or war with the United States.
There’s an important distinction between approving the attack plan and ordering the attack plan. Our military forces are poised to strike, but at least as of Tuesday, no U.S. fighters are in Iranian airspace, according to Pentagon officials.
President Trump spoke to reporters Wednesday while inspecting the installation of flagpoles at the White House.
“I don’t know how much longer it’s going to go on,” Trump said. “They’re totally defenseless. They have no air defense whatsoever, totally captured. We totally captured the air.”
There’s that “we” again. One of the reasons people keep wondering if the U.S. is covertly helping Israel in an offensive manner as well as the revealed defensive manner (helping shoot down incoming ballistic missiles) is that Trump keeps using “we” to describe Israel’s actions in the war. “We now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran.” “We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now.”
I know, I know, everybody’s obsessed with which pronouns you use these days.
Yesterday at the White House, Trump continued:
Q: What does unconditional surrender mean?
Donald Trump: Well, you know what it means, unconditional—
Q: Can you explain—
Donald Trump: Two very simple words, very simple: unconditional surrender. That means I’ve had it. Okay, I’ve had it, I give up, no more. Then we go blow up all the nuclear stuff that’s all over the place there. They had bad intentions. For 40 years, they’ve been saying death to America, death to Israel, death to anybody else that they didn’t like. They were bullies. They were schoolyard bullies and now they’re not bullies anymore, but we’ll see what happens. Look, nothing’s finished until it’s finished. War is very complex, a lot of bad things can happen, a lot of turns are made. So, I don’t know. I wouldn’t say that we won anything yet. I would say that we sure as hell made a lot of progress and we’ll see. The next week is going to be very big, maybe less than a week, maybe less. But is there anybody here that said it would be okay to have to have a hostile — zealous, really — but to have a hostile country, have a nuclear weapon that could destroy 25 miles, but much more than that, could destroy other nations just by the breeze blowing the dust. You know, that dust blows to other nations and they get decimated. This is just not a threat you can have. And we’ve been threatened by Iran for many years. And if you go back and look at my history, if you go back 15 years, I was saying, we cannot let Iran get a nuclear weapon. I’ve been saying it for a long time. I mean it more now than I ever meant.
The Economist has a scoop about the Israeli intelligence that spurred its decision to launch this military operation:
We understand that the information presented by Israel includes a detailed account of a recent, more urgent, push by Iranian scientists towards “weaponization”, or the creation of an explosive nuclear device. The dossier provides two key pieces of reported evidence for this claim. The first is that an Iranian scientific team has squirrelled away a quantity of nuclear material, of unclear enrichment status, that is unknown to the monitors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), a UN watchdog (on June 9th the IAEA assessed Iran had official stockpiles of over 400kg of highly enriched uranium). The second piece of reported evidence is that the scientists have accelerated their work and were about to meet commanders of Iran’s missile corps, apparently to prepare for the future “mating” of a nuclear warhead with a missile. . . .
In a report published on May 31st, the IAEA noted that in 2003 Iran had planned to conduct what the Institute for Science and International Security, a think-tank, calls a “cold test” — a simulated nuclear weapon which uses natural or depleted uranium rather than weapons-grade uranium. . . .
The Israeli intelligence dossiers also contain information that, if correct, is genuinely new. They suggest that roughly six years ago the scientists formed a secret “Special Progress Group”, under the auspices of the former AMAD director, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. This group’s aim was to prepare the way for a much quicker weaponisation process, if and when a decision was made by Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, to rush for a bomb. Mr Fakhrizadeh was assassinated by Israel in November 2020. On June 13th in the first hours of the war, the Israeli government published slides describing this backstory. But we have been told that it also shared further assessments with allies that suggest the Special Progress Group stepped up its research at the end of last year. Iran had a new incentive to advance to a bomb. It was reeling from the limited impact of its missile attacks on Israel, and the depletion of its air defenses by Israeli strikes in October 2024. And it was facing the collapse of its proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, in Gaza and Lebanon.
Much has been made of the testimony of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, before the Senate Intelligence Committee on March 25: “The IC [Intelligence Community] continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and supreme leader Khameni has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003.”
That Economist report points to a detail in the next-to-last paragraph of a Wall Street Journal report from two days ago:
The U.S. intelligence community said last July in a report to Congress that Iran has “undertaken activities that better position it to produce a nuclear device, if it chooses to do so.” The report omitted what has been a standard U.S. intelligence assessment for years that Iran “isn’t currently undertaking the key nuclear weapons development activities necessary to produce a testable nuclear device.”
In retrospect, that change seems much more significant than the public realized at the time. Sometime in 2024, the U.S. Intelligence Community saw or heard something that made them no longer confident in that previous assessment. The Iranian regime was “undertaking the key nuclear weapons development activities necessary to produce a testable nuclear device.”
Also note that yesterday on X, Vice President JD Vance wrote, “Tulsi’s testimony was in March, and a lot has changed since then.”
Okay, but if the assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community has changed since March, and we’re on the brink of war . . . wouldn’t it be a good idea to share with the American public and the world what our government has seen that has changed?
A New Excuse to Avoid In-Person Staff Meetings
This report, from The Jewish Chronicle, citing Mossad sources, is just fascinating and sounds straight out of an espionage thriller:
Israel secret services used a fake phone call to trick the top commanders of Iran’s air force into gathering at a single location before taking them out in a targeted strike, an Israeli Channel 12 commentator has said.
In a statement confirmed to the JC by Israeli sources, Amit Segal told the Call Me Back podcast on Monday: “What Israel did was create a fake phone call for 20 members of the air force senior staff an calling them to a specific bunker in Tehran.”
This meant there was no one to give the order to fire the initial salvo of 1,000 ballistic missiles as Iran had previously threatened to do, he added.
According to sources familiar with the operation, Mossad initiated a targeted disinformation effort days before the strike.
Using falsified communications through Iranian channels, they triggered what appeared to be an emergency meeting.
The ruse successfully drew the entire senior leadership of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Aerospace Force, including Commander General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, his deputies, and key technical personnel, into a fortified bunker outside Tehran.
Moments before the strike began, that bunker was hit in a precision airstrike, eliminating Iran’s top missile command.
Their last thought: “This meeting could have been an email.”
ADDENDUM: In case you missed it yesterday, the Telegraph newspaper in the United Kingdom reported that three Chinese cargo planes flew to Iran during the ongoing conflict. Then an aviation expert contended that the planes — owned by a European company — were probably just flying into Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, near the Iranian border, and that the tracking signal is erroneously making it appear that the planes are flying into Iranian airspace. With that said, the image on FlightRadar24 makes it look like one of those planes went well beyond the border into Iran.