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central intelligence agency
Leaked CIA Analysis Shows Trump and Hegseth 'Lied Through Their Teeth' About Iran War, Says Murphy
White House officials "just straight up fabricated shit," said the Democratic senator from Connecticut.
May 07, 2026
Just hours before the Trump administration conducted what it claimed were "self-defense strikes" against "Iranian military facilities," The Washington Post reported Thursday that the Central Intelligence Agency concluded that "Iran can survive the US naval blockade for at least three to four months before facing more severe economic hardship."
Citing four unnamed officials familiar with the analysis, the newspaper highlighted that "the CIA analysis might even be underestimating Iran's economic resilience if Tehran is able to smuggle oil via overland routes."
Militarily, "Iran retains about 75% of its prewar inventories of mobile launchers and about 70% of its prewar stockpiles of missiles," the Post added. "There is evidence that the regime has been able to recover and reopen almost all of its underground storage facilities, repair some damaged missiles, and even assemble some new missiles that were nearly complete when the war began."
Drop Site News' Murtaza Hussain responded that if this assessment along with a previous one from the Center for Strategic and International Studies about "remaining US munitions and interceptor capacity are even approximately correct, it goes a long way to explaining why Trump seems so eager to end the war whereas the Iranians have either dug in or escalated their negotiating positions. The missile math of continuing the conflict would be much more favorable to the Iranians, especially if the war continued for a significant time."
"Prior to the war, interceptor capacity compared to the size of the Iranian missile stockpile seemed like the most rationally incontrovertible reason to avoid fighting such a conflict, even for people who found it politically desirable," he added. "This also might explain why the US and Israel pivoted towards the end to threatening countervalue strikes against civilian targets if attempts to destroy the underground missile cities by air were ineffective."
The Post's reporting came one month into a fragile ceasefire and starkly contrasts the recent framing of conditions in Iran from President Donald Trump and others in his administration, including Defense Secretary Pete Hesgeth.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) responded to the Post's reporting by quoting Hegseth, who said in March that "never before has a modern, capable military, which Iran used to have, been so quickly destroyed and made combat ineffective."
Murphy declared: "They lied through their teeth. Just straight up fabricated shit."
Still, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly stuck to the administration's framing in a Thursday statement to the Post.
"During Operation Epic Fury, Iran was crushed militarily," Kelly said. "Now, they are being strangled economically by Operation Economic Fury and losing $500 million per day thanks to the United States military's successful blockade of Iranian ports. The Iranian regime knows full well their current reality is not sustainable, and President Trump holds all the cards as negotiators work to make a deal."
Meanwhile, some experts were unsurprised that the CIA privately delivered a "sober" assessment contradicting the administration's public commentary on the conflict—which it now claims is no longer an active "war," seemingly to dodge a key congressional deadline.
"Nice to know that a confidential CIA analysis is confirming what close observers of the Iranian economy have been saying publicly for weeks! Intelligent policymakers rely on intelligence. But Trump jeopardized diplomacy by instigating a blockade that was never going to work," said Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Europe and founder of the think tank Bourse & Bazaar Foundation.
Sharing the reporting on social media, Jennifer Kavanagh, a senior fellow and director of military analysis at the think tank Defense Priorities, wrote: "As I argued a week into the U.S. blockade, Iran can hold out for months without economic collapse. The costs for the US and the world are increasingly unsustainable, however."
Earlier this week, Stephen Semler, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, estimated that the US government spent $71.8 billion on the Iran War during its first 60 days, an average of $1.2 billion daily. The International Monetary Fund warned last month that the conflict could cause a global recession.
Last Friday, Trump responded to the War Powers Act's 60-day deadline by claiming to Congress that his war—which already violated US and international law—had been "terminated." The White House said at the time that no fire had been exchanged since April 7, when a ceasefire deal was reached just hours after the president issued a genocidal threat against the Iranian people.
However, on Thursday evening, United States Central Command announced that Iran "launched multiple missiles, drones, and small boats" at American warships. CENTCOM added that it "eliminated inbound threats and targeted Iranian military facilities responsible for attacking US forces, including missile and drone launch sites; command and control locations; and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance nodes."
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'Wyden Siren' Sounds Anew as Senator's Cryptic Letter Hints at CIA Wrongdoing
"When Wyden sends a cryptic letter or asks a pointed question suggesting something concerning is happening behind the classification curtain, something concerning is absolutely happening," said one observer.
Feb 05, 2026
Sen. Ron Wyden "only talks like this when the spies do something *real* bad."
That's how journalist Spencer Ackerman reacted Thursday to a letter from the Oregon Democrat to Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe expressing alarm over unspecified CIA activities, as observers noted Wyden's history of heads-up previews of government wrongdoing.
“I write to alert you to a classified letter I sent you earlier today, in which I express deep concerns about CIA activities,” Wyden, who is a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in the letter. “Thank you for your attention to this important matter.”
Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chair Mark Warner “shares many of the concerns expressed by Sen. Wyden in his letter, and in fact he has expressed them to... Ratcliffe himself," according to a spokesperson for the Virginia Democrat.
This is how Sen. Ron Wyden clues the public into activity that he finds extremely alarming. He does a press release about a letter he sent to the director of the CIA that basically says, 'I want to make sure you saw the classified letter I sent early today.' www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/do...
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— Kashmir Hill (@kashhill.bsky.social) February 4, 2026 at 1:53 PM
Wyden told HuffPost Thursday that “the reason I sent the public letter is that is all that I’m allowed to say publicly, and I’m gonna leave it at that.”
“I said what I did for a specific reason," he added. "I wrote it for a specific reason. That’s all I can say.”
Wyden has a storied history of issuing cryptic warnings about classified government or intelligence misdeeds before they are disclosed to the public, going back to the Obama administration's secret reinterpretation of the PATRIOT Act in 2011.
The senator also warned about a withheld 2015 Department of Justice legal opinion on cybersecurity, Section 702 surveillance during the first Trump administration, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) use of bulk administrative subpoenas to collect millions of Americans’ financial records during the Biden administration, and more.
Techdirt blog editor Mike Masnick calls it the "Wyden Siren": "The pattern repeats. Wyden asks a specific question about surveillance. The intelligence community answers a slightly different question in a way that technically isn’t lying but is designed to mislead. Wyden calls them out. Eventually, the truth comes out, and it’s always worse than people assumed."
"The track record here is essentially perfect," Masnick added. "When Wyden sends a cryptic letter or asks a pointed question suggesting something concerning is happening behind the classification curtain, something concerning is absolutely happening behind the classification curtain."
Masnick continued:
So what’s happening at the CIA that has Wyden sending a two-sentence letter that amounts to “I legally cannot tell you what’s wrong, but something is very wrong?"
We don’t know yet. That’s the whole point of classification—it keeps the public in the dark about what their government is doing in their name. But Wyden’s letter is the equivalent of a fire alarm. He’s seen something. He can’t say what. But he wants there to be a record that he raised the concern.
"Given the current administration’s approach to, well, everything, the possibilities are unfortunately vast," Masnick said. "Is it about domestic surveillance? Something about current [Office of the Director of National Intelligence] Tulsi Gabbard? International operations gone sideways? Some new interpretation of the CIA’s authorities that would make Americans’ hair stand on end if they knew about it? We’re left guessing, just like we were guessing about the PATRIOT Act’s secret interpretation back in 2011."
"But here’s what we do know: Ron Wyden has been doing this for at least 15 years," Masnick added. "And every single time, he’s been vindicated. The secret programs were real. The abuses were real. The gap between what the public thought was happening and what was actually happening was real."
"The Wyden Siren is blaring," he added. "Pay attention."
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Unrest in Iran, Plausible Deniability, and the Ghosts of 1953
In a world where information warfare blurs fact and narrative, we must resist the temptation to treat capability as conspiracy. But we must also resist the delusion that the absence of evidence today means an absence of action.
Dec 31, 2025
Speculation about covert operations tends to rise with geopolitical heat, and few places are as historically charged as Iran when it comes to foreign interference. The memory of the 1953 CIA-backed coup remains vivid in Tehran’s political consciousness, shaping both internal paranoia and external discourse. In today’s climate of US-Iran hostility—marked by sanctions, nuclear disputes, and regional proxy conflicts—whispers of destabilization efforts inevitably resurface. But plausibility should not be mistaken for proof.
Yet there are ghosts worth heeding…
In 1953, the CIA executed Operation TPAJAX—a covert operation that overthrew Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, reinstating the autocratic Shah. This operation was denied, downplayed, and hidden for decades. It wasn’t until 2017—64 years later—that the US government officially declassified key documents from the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series detailing the planning and implementation of the coup. The materials that confirmed America’s role in the 1953 coup were not fully acknowledged through official channels until generations had passed, long after their geopolitical consequences had reshaped the Middle East.
Given that historical precedent, it’s not unreasonable to wonder: If something like that were happening today, would we know?
If the CIA is involved in orchestrating unrest in Iran today, we may not know until 2089.
Currently, Iran is again roiled by protests. Slogans like “Death to the Dictator” echo in the streets. Western headlines frame this as grassroots unrest, and it may well be. But for a country with a long and painful history of foreign interference cloaked in democracy rhetoric, the line between internal dissent and external orchestration is never clean.
From a strategic standpoint, the United States clearly possesses the capacity to conduct covert influence operations. Legal mechanisms for such actions exist under US law, with covert operations authorized by the president and subject to congressional oversight. The intelligence community, with decades of institutional experience, is equipped with modern tools ranging from cyber operations to narrative influence and financial pressure. These capabilities are real. But capacity alone tells us nothing about intent.
Public policy statements from the US government consistently emphasize deterrence and nonproliferation, not regime change. While tensions are undeniable, open endorsement of covert destabilization would carry significant political and legal costs. Congress, the media, and public opinion create substantial friction for any administration considering escalation by clandestine means. Adversarial relationships can foster suspicion, but they do not constitute motive.
Environmental conditions further complicate the picture. Iran, despite internal pressures and unrest, retains a strong security apparatus and hardened counter-intelligence services. Regional dynamics—involving militias, proxies, and overlapping crises—do not create the same permissive environment that existed in the early Cold War. On the contrary, they elevate the risks of blowback and exposure. Modern operations would need to be diffuse, multi domain, and plausibly deniable—relying on soft pressure through economic levers, information warfare, and alliances rather than the heavy-handed political interventions of the past.
And yet, these more nuanced forms of influence are precisely what make attribution difficult. In a world of cyber shadows, targeted sanctions, and disinformation, it’s easy to see ghosts. But serious allegations require serious evidence. Credible investigative reporting, declassified documents, congressional disputes, or allied intelligence consensus are necessary to move the needle from theoretical possibility to actionable suspicion—let alone attribution.
That’s where Dan Kovalik’s The Plot to Attack Iran enters the conversation. Kovalik draws clear lines from historical US interventions—including the CIA's own admission of past regime change—to present-day provocations and misinformation. He details a long history of fabricated threats, from nonexistent Iraqi WMDs to exaggerated fears about Iran’s nuclear program. He argues that current rhetoric and actions—sanctions, assassinations, drone incursions, proxy pressures—form a consistent pattern of provocation meant to destabilize Iran under the guise of security policy.
Kovalik also reminds us that accusations of terrorism, often leveled at Iran, are selectively applied. While Iran is listed as a state sponsor of terrorism, US allies like Saudi Arabia—implicated in exporting Wahhabi extremism—are exempt from such labels. Groups like Hezbollah, which Iran supports, are framed by the US as terroristic, while Kovalik argues they act in regional resistance to Israeli occupation. This asymmetry of language is not just semantic—it builds the ideological scaffolding for war.
Legal oversight, international norms, and the specter of asymmetric retaliation all serve as meaningful deterrents. A misstep in this space could trigger regional escalation, damage US credibility, or backfire diplomatically. These are not trivial constraints. They are built-in brakes against rash or covert adventurism. And yet, none of them prevented the 1953 coup. Nor did they stop covert operations in Iraq, Libya, or Syria. History shows us that legal deterrents and political norms often collapse under the weight of perceived strategic necessity.
Bottom line: While it is analytically sound to say the United States could conduct covert operations against Iran under the right conditions, there is no defensible basis to assert that such actions are underway without evidence. Plausibility is not a claim—it is a lens for understanding risk, not a substitute for proof.
But perhaps the more sobering truth is this: If the CIA is involved in orchestrating unrest in Iran today, we may not know until 2089. Sixty-four years is a long time to wait for the truth. In that gap, entire wars can be fought, nations broken, and histories rewritten. The ghosts of TPAJAX aren’t just historical—they’re prophetic. And Iran, perhaps more than any other nation, knows that ghosts have long memories.
In a world where information warfare blurs fact and narrative, we must resist the temptation to treat capability as conspiracy. But we must also resist the delusion that the absence of evidence today means an absence of action. The stakes—diplomatic, strategic, and human—are far too high for anything less than disciplined analysis and historical awareness.
The past may not repeat, but it whispers—and in Iran, it is whispering loudly.
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