Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine announced on Thursday that President Donald Trump’s military strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities came after two agents spent over 15 years gathering intelligence and developing the GBU-57 “bunker buster bombs.”
During a Thursday press conference, Caine explained that two unidentified agents in the Defense Threat Reduction Agency worked for over 15 years to gather intelligence and develop the GBU-57 bombs that were used in the U.S. military strike against Iran’s Fordow nuclear facility. Caine noted that the Defense Threat Reduction Agency is the “world’s leading expert on deeply buried underground targets.”
Caine explained that a Defense Threat Reduction Agency officer was tasked to study and understand a “major construction project in the mounts of Iran” in 2009. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff noted that an “additional teammate” worked with the agent for over 15 years on the intelligence mission.
“For more than 15 years, this officer and his teammate lived and breathed this single target, Fordow, a critical element of Iran’s covert nuclear weapons program,” Caine said.
Caine told reporters that the two agents documented everything at the Fordow nuclear facility, including the construction, electrical systems, ventilation, exhaust shaft, weather, discard material, and geology. Caine said the agents watched “every nook” and “every crater.”
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“They literally dreamed about this target at night when they slept,” Caine said. “They weren’t able to discuss this with their family, their wives, their kids, their friends, but they just kept grinding it out, and along the way, they realized we did not have a weapon that could adequately strike and kill this target.”
Caine told reporters that the agents then worked with the “industry and other tacticians” on the development of the GBU-57 bombs, conducted hundreds of tests, and dropped the bombs on “extremely realistic targets” in order to “kill this target at the time and place of our nation’s choosing.”
After over 15 years of working on gathering intelligence and developing the GBU-57 bombs, Caine said the work of the two agents finally paid off when Trump ordered the strikes on Iran’s three nuclear facilities last weekend.
Caine told reporters that he met with the two Defense Threat Reduction Agency officers on Wednesday and that one of the agents told him, “I can’t even get my head around this. My heart is so filled with the pride of being a part of this team. I am so honored to be a part of this.”
“Operation Midnight Hammer was the culmination of those 15 years of incredible work, the air crews, the tanker crews, the weapons crews that built the weapons, [and] the load crews that loaded it,” Caine added.
