The CNN Leak Is a Desperate Effort to Deny Israel Victory

While Israeli and US military precision shattered Iran’s infrastructure, the press rushed to repair the theocracy's reputation.

By Bob Goldberg

The media has done its job well for Tehran. It has managed to reframe a devastating, targeted assault on Iran’s nuclear and command infrastructure as a costly waste of time. Based on a single leaked preliminary intelligence assessment of the damage done to Iran’s nuclear operations, which was revealed to every major news outlet simultaneously, reporters dutifully carried the message: Israeli and US strikes set Iran back by only months. Buried behind the headlines is a far more damning truth: the leak itself was a serious breach of national security. Whoever disclosed it should be prosecuted.

The leak was no accident. It was strategic, designed to undermine America and Israel’s victory. The treasonous source? Intelligence attributed to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), one of eighteen agencies within the US intelligence community. But unlike the CIA or NSA, DIA remains a haven for the remnants of what might fairly be called the Beltway's last operational chapter of the Obama-era "Deep State." That matters.

CNN's reporting suggests that the DIA concluded the strikes "did not destroy the core components of Iran's nuclear program" and would likely only delay its progress by months. Even if that assessment proves accurate-a generous assumption—this is still a single-agency view. It is not a community-wide intelligence consensus.

The leak also reveals how low Israel’s critics are eager to stoop. These are the same voices who, until last week, insisted Iran had not decided to pursue a nuclear weapon. Now, in breathless tones, they report that Iran is, in fact, perilously close. We are asked to believe both that the nuclear program is not militarized, nd that we only delayed it by months.

This is gaslighting on a global scale to deny Israel its rise to hegemony in the Middle East.

The Illusion of the JCPOA

There is a bitter irony in all of this. These are the same people who insist that the deal Iran and the US struck – limiting enrichment in exchange for sanctions relief – would have avoided war if Trump had not walked away from it durdurings first term.

The JCPOA's defenders claimed it would block all paths to the bomb. What they never admitted—what they deliberately left out—was that Iran's Amad Plan, its secret warhead and delivery program, was entirely excluded from the deal. The IAEA never saw the archived documents. The inspectors never touched the bomb designs. And when Israel raided a Tehran warehouse in 2018 and made off with the files, it wasn't the IAEA that discovered the deception. It was Mossad.

Even after signing the JCPOA, Iran retained technical documentation, conducted high-explosive testing, and developed uranium metallurgy for warheads. And no one ever explained why a civilian energy program needed uranium enriched to 60%, just a whisker away from weapons-grade.

Even worse, the JCPOA included R&D partnerships, workshops, and training on nuclear sabotage prevention—information that could be fed back to North Korea through covert channels.

The JCPOA also ignored Iran's decades-long collaboration with North Korea. These regimes shared missile designs, uranium routes, and reactor construction. Pyongyang even helped Assad build a reactor in Syria, destroyed by Israel in 2007. Does anyone believe Iran didn’t have a hand in that? The Obama administration chose to ignore this axis. A nuclear non-proliferation deal that excluded the world's most dangerous atomic proliferators was sold as progress. It was folly.

Iran and North Korea's cooperation was not hypothetical. Congressional testimony from 2015 described North Korea as Iran's "munitions backshop." The JCPOA allowed for workshops, training, and nuclear infrastructure protection programs that North Korea could exploit through Iranian intermediaries. This wasn't diplomacy. It was national security malpractice.

The Real Iranian Strategy: A 15-Year Ambush

Iran's strategy was never to use the JCPOA as a path to peace. It was a 15-year ambush—a slow, deliberate encirclement of Israel. A "ring of fire" strategy built around Hezbollah in Lebanon, IRGC and Iraqi militias in Syria, Hamas and PIJ in Gaza, Houthi missiles in Yemen, sleeper cells in the West Bank, and plans to destabilize Jordan. All paid for with sanctions relief. After 2015, Iran’s subsidies to Hezbollah’s aid surged from $100M to $700M a year, and Hamas’s rose from near-zero (2012–17) to $ 350M a year by 2023 after the Biden Administration unfroze assets and let Iran sell oil once again.

The nuclear program wasn’t meant for immediate use. It was the insurance policy—a backstop to deter Israeli retaliation once Iran launched its conventional proxy war. The sunset clauses of the JCPOA were timed to expire just as Iran completed the circle.

That plan was disrupted, not by negotiation, but by miscalculation. Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar launched the October 7 attack early. He believed Israel was weak, fractured by protests and disunity. He expected the rest of the axis to rise with him.

They didn’t.

Israel recovered. America responded. And over the past 20 months, the axis has been degraded. Hamas has been dismembered. The Houthis have been pushed back. Hezbollah is bleeding. Iran is a shell of itself: the ballistic missile capability has been decimated, the nuclear scientists, bomb makers and IRGC’s senior commanders are dead. What remains of the nuclear program is orphaned enriched uranium.

B-2 Stealth Bomber Delivering a Message to Iran

Appeasing Tyrants: Then and Now

But let us not kid ourselves—this phenomenon isn't new. The Western elites, editorial boards, and policy mandarins who today fawn over Khamenei’s fatwas and mouth his slogans of “nuclear energy for all, weapons for none” have a long pedigree of being wrong in morally catastrophic ways.

In the 1930s, many journalists, diplomats, and politicians lauded Adolf Hitler as a man of peace. When he reoccupied the Rhineland in 1936—a direct violation of the Treaty of Versailles—the Times of London called it “a reasonable action taken by a proud people.” As he annexed Austria and made demands on Czechoslovakia, the British press called his claims “understandable” and urged more dialogue.

After the Munich Agreement, Chamberlain waved a piece of paper and declared, “Peace for our time.” Hitler had promised “no more territorial demands.” Within six months, he had devoured the rest of Czechoslovakia. Neville Chamberlain’s government, backed by many in the press, wanted one more conference, even after Hitler invaded Poland. Churchill alone, out of government, warned that appeasement would end in conflagration: “They were also giving away the interests of Britain, and the interests of peace and justice.”

Now swap the names.

Khamenei is today’s tyrant, cloaking genocidal ambition in the sanctimony of fatwas. Since 2003, he’s claimed nuclear weapons are un-Islamic—a lie swallowed whole by analysts who should know better. “We don’t want a nuclear bomb,” he said in 2005. “These things don’t agree with our principles.” He even issued a religious decree, a fatwa, against it.

The press nodded along. Editorials praised Iran’s restraint. Soros-funded “non-proliferation” groups regurgitated the line. CNN and the New York Times now report Iran’s uranium enrichment progress with a straight face, while pretending not to notice how the regime stockpiles 60%-enriched material and builds precision delivery systems. If the fatwa is authentic, why the centrifuges?

It is appeasement all over again—this time cloaked in hashtags and diplomatic euphemisms. As Churchill warned in 1939, “This is not a question of fighting for Danzig or fighting for Poland… We are fighting to save the whole world from the pestilence of Nazi tyranny.” Today, Israel stands alone again, confronting a different pestilence—and still the world looks for another peace conference, another piece of paper to wave, another lie to believe.

So no, the mistake wasn’t walking away from the JCPOA. The mistake was signing it in the first place. Netanyahu and Trump corrected that nearly fatal error.

The Media's Mission: Undermine Israel

And yet, the media has already begun the next phase of psychological warfare: deny Israel and the West a victory. CNN, The New York Times, and Reuters have rushed to quote anonymous sources claiming the strikes did little. No one seems to ask why the IAEA hasn’t been allowed to inspect the sites. Or why Iran still refuses access.

The same outlets that insisted for years Iran was not building a bomb now claim the strikes merely delayed it. It can’t be both.

And the messaging is clear: now that Iran has been weakened, it is time to pressure Israel. We are told that because Hamas is degraded and Hezbollah bruised, Israel should return to the table. We are told it’s time for new diplomatic risks. A two-state solution. A withdrawal. A reboot.

This is nothing new. It is the same diplomatic bait-and-switch that has followed every Israeli victory since 1948. Let Israel fight, then demand it surrender the spoils.

Israel Must Say No

Israel must respond clearly: absolutely not.

Deterrence is built on strength, not signatures. It does not grow from compromise. It grows from credibility—the demonstrated willingness to destroy those threatening you.

The dream of a Palestinian state is not a dream of peace. It is a dream of Iranian forward deployment. Of missiles in Samaria. Of drones over Ben Gurion. No fence or Iron Dome can neutralize that.

The more profound lesson is this: Israel must prepare for a world in which America is no longer a reliable ally.

Today, the Democrat party has become unrecognizable. This is no longer the party of Truman. It is the party of Tlaib, of campus pogroms, of iftars with Hamas sympathizers. Tomorrow, it may be the party of Ocasio-Cortez, or worse. Except for John Fetterman, every other Senate Democrat criticized the strike, including the self-anointed and self-serving guardian of the Jews, Chuck Schumer.

Imagine a President Harris, with Vice President Tim the Tampon, indistinguishable from the latest TikTok activist. Imagine a Democratic Party that treats Israel not as an ally, but as an apartheid regime to be sanctioned. And while 80 percent of Republicans strongly support Israel and the strike against Iran, it is clear that friendship is a fragile reed.

Israel must build alliances not from nostalgia, but necessity. Its deterrent must be sovereign, scalable, and unapologetic. Its economy must be secure. Its defense industries must be global. And its red lines must be enforced without waiting for State Department approval.

"Never Again" is not a slogan. It is a doctrine. It means never again trusting foreign powers to protect Jewish lives. Never again depending on European goodwill. Never again permitting genocidal movements to gather strength.

It means that when the world uses Israel’s success against it—to pressure it, isolate it, and guilt it into retreat—Israel must respond not with diplomacy, but with determination.

The next battlefield won’t be Gaza. It will be Geneva. Brussels. Foggy Bottom, the anti-Israel United Nations. And the only way to win that war is to make it clear: Israel will shape its foreign policy and statecraft to reinforce its new position as a world power.

And when the world forgets, Israel must remind it through decisive actions, not empty words. Israel's strength is a clear message that it will forge its own path forward. No distortion by biased media will alter this unwavering course.