Last Thursday, as Israel expanded its military campaign, Iranian authorities at the Fordow nuclear complex in the country’s northwest dispatched 16 cargo trucks to the underground site’s primary tunnel entrance. These vehicles proceeded, over the next 24 hours, to move unidentified equipment a kilometer away, while working to fortify the mountain-covered crown jewel in the Islamic Republic’s atomic program.
American and Israeli intelligence, as well as private satellite operators, detected these activities around the complex, U.S. officials working on Iran told The Free Press. But Washington and Jerusalem decided not to act, in part to try and track where the vehicles ultimately went, but also to wait for President Donald Trump to formally green-light an attack on Fordow, which he did a day later. Now, nuclear experts worry, Tehran may have used this window to slip sensitive equipment and materials to other secret locations across the country.
“I wish the Israelis had moved quicker to disable Fordow,” David Albright, a former United Nations weapons inspector, told me in the aftermath of the American bombing campaign of the facility. “It’s still a mystery exactly what was in those trucks. But any highly enriched uranium at Fordow was likely gone before the attack.”
Trump administration officials on Sunday said the 14 GBU-12 “bunker buster” bombs—known as Massive Ordnance Penetrators, or MOPs—dropped on Iran over the weekend inflicted massive damage on the three atomic sites. Trump, announcing the attack in a national address on Saturday night, said the Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan nuclear sites had been “completely and totally obliterated” by the B-2 bomber strikes. Pentagon defense chief Pete Hegseth, briefing reporters Sunday morning on Operation Midnight Hammer, said it was “an incredible and overwhelming success.”
The reality is much more complicated.
