US intel community agreed before war 'Iran wasn't developing a nuclear weapon': ex-counterterrorism chief

Joe Kent, the ex-director of the National Counterterrorism Center, dropped a direct challenge to the justification for America’s war with Iran. Before strikes began, he says, the entire U.S. intelligence community—including the CIA—concluded that Tehran was not developing a nuclear weapon.

Kent laid it out plainly on X: the IC also predicted Iran would target U.S. bases, attempt to shut the Strait of Hormuz, and that striking Iranian leadership would only strengthen the regime and empower hardliners. All of those assessments, he argues, proved professionally sound. What overrode them was “the narrative & agenda spun by a foreign government—Israel.”

The former official’s account lands at a moment when skeptics already distrust the intelligence apparatus that once peddled the Russia collusion narrative. Kent himself has been dismissed by critics as a “three time loser,” a leaker frozen out of key meetings, and a “deep state hack.” The White House was blunt: spokesman Davis Ingle called Kent’s comments “riddled with lies” and tied them to a “self-aggrandizing resignation letter.”

Yet the core tension Kent highlights refuses to vanish. Iran had enriched uranium to 60 percent—far beyond the 3 to 5 percent needed for civilian reactors—while sitting atop vast oil reserves. Defenders of the war ask why enrich at all if not for weapons. Kent’s response is implicit: the intelligence community weighed that evidence and still judged the nuclear program non-weaponized. Israel’s warnings carried the day instead.

Commenters on the right split sharply. Some called Kent’s claims recycled “Iraq WMD” skepticism; others saw a pattern of foreign influence overriding American interests. One poster suggested the real lesson is simple: never elect another Democrat president. Another labeled the entire episode proof that Tehran’s conventional arsenal was junk, making a purchased nuke the more likely threat.

The uncomfortable question Kent demands we answer is how a foreign government’s agenda defeated coordinated U.S. intelligence assessments and pulled Washington into another Middle East conflict. Until that mechanism is exposed, the same forces can do it again.

Original reporting: Freerepublic.com