FILE PHOTO: US Air Force Lt. General and Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) Jeffrey Kruse (REUTERS)
US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth has sacked Lt Gen Jeffrey Kruse, whose agency’s initial intelligence assessment of US damage to Iranian nuclear sites angered President Donald Trump.
Rena Easton and her late husband, Sir Ian Easton, are the reason I became a author of James Bond books. I got four going.
POTUS had his goon fire America’s James Bond.
John Presco
A second senior Air Force general has been forced out at the Pentagon
Nicholas Slayton
Fri, August 22, 2025 at 12:24 PM PDT
3 min read
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth fired the military’s top intelligence officer, according to the Washington Post. Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, is the second high-profile Air Force general this week to be relieved or abruptly announce their retirement.
The services top general, Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin, announced Monday he was retiring after only two years in the position, a job which is nearly always held by the same officer for a four-year term. Several news sources reported that Allvin was being forced out by Hegseth, but would be allowed to announce his retirement. Unlike Kruse, the Air Force has said Allvin will remain as chief of staff until his replacement is confirmed by the Senate.
The Washington Post first reported Kruse’s firing on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter. The Pentagon confirmed Kruse’s exit in a curt one-sentence statement: “Lt. Gen. Kruse will no longer serve as DIA Director,” a senior defense official said in a statement.
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His firing comes two months after Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth criticized a DIA report that said the large American airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, trumpeted by Hegseth and President Donald Trump as a historic success, damaged but did not destroy the installations.
No reason for Kruse’s dismissal was given, except a “loss of confidence,” according to the Washington Post. That term is widely used throughout the military when commanders are relieved, and can cover a wide range of reasons, ranging from poor on-duty performance to personal misconduct.
Kruse previously served as Director of Intelligence for Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve and then Director of Intelligence for U.S. Indo-Pacific Command. He took over as Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency in February 2024.
Allvin is a former test pilot who spent much of his career flying cargo planes before moving into command and senior staff positions, and was the Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force before being tapped for the service’s top job in 2023.
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Kruse and Allvin are the latest officials in a top military position to be removed from their jobs under Hegseth and Trump. In February, Trump fired several top military leaders who were women or non-white, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown Jr., Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti, and Coast Guard Commandant Linda Fagan. The Air Force’s second in command, Gen. James Slife, was also relieved. In April, Hegseth fired Vice Adm. Shoshanna Chatfield from her role as senior NATO planner, and Air Force Gen. Timothy Haugh, who was both the head of U.S. Cyber Command and oversaw the National Security Agency, was relieved of his command.
In June, a DIA report on Operation Midnight Hammer, the U.S. bombing campaign on Iranian nuclear facilities, found that the bunker buster bombs and cruise missiles severely damaged three nuclear sites, but did not totally destroy them, as the administration initially claimed.. After the report came out, Hegseth criticized it as “preliminary,” saying it would take “weeks” to fully assess the strikes. “There’s low confidence in this particular report. It says in the report there are gaps in the information,” he said at a June 26 Pentagon news conference.
Pete Hegseth Just Fired a Top General Who Pissed Off Trump
Robert McCoy
Fri, August 22, 2025 at 1:36 PM PDT
1 min read13
Inconvenient truths don’t go unpunished in the Trump administration.
It’s a lesson that Lieutenant General Jeffrey Kruse learned the hard way on Friday, as The Washington Post reported that he’s been fired from his position as chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
The DIA under Kruse was responsible for the classified preliminary report about America’s June strike on Iran, which gave President Donald Trump much grief once it leaked to the press, as it painted a starkly different picture of the attack than his administration had.
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Though the report expressly acknowledged its preliminary nature, its findings—that the strike set Iran’s alleged nuclear program back by only a few months, at most—put a damper on Hegseth’s and Trump’s insistence that they had totally decimated their targets. The president had referred to the attack as “one of the most successful military strikes in history,” comparable to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Hegseth axed Kruse for “loss of confidence,” per the Post.
Trump Trashes Sir Ian Easton’s Work
Posted on January 13, 2018 by Royal Rosamond Press
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, United Kingdom’s Secretary of State for Defence Liam Fox, Sir David Richards, UK Chief of Defence, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen render honors during the playing of the British and American national anthems at the Pentagon, April 26, 2011. Defense Department photo by Cherie Cullen (released)
I am right! I saw this coming! Trump insults a whole continent for not being The Right Stuff, and snubs the British Commonwealth, treats them like shitholes.
Jon
In an early-morning tweet, Trump said he was scrapping a visit because he is “not a big fan” of the real estate deal in which the United States sold the lease of its old embassy, located in an affluent, central London neighborhood, to move to a new site in south London, an area Trump described as an “off location.”
Many Londoners suggested the real reason he is not coming is because he is concerned about hostile demonstrations.
Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, said a visit would spark “mass peaceful protests.” Trump is not welcome in London while he pursues a “divisive agenda,” Khan tweeted, and “it seems he’s finally got that message.”
But at least one prominent British cabinet official took no part in the gloating. Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, a former mayor of London, accused Khan and Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn of endangering the “crucial relationship” between the United States and Britain. He also called Khan a “puffed up pompous popinjay.”
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The White House had not formally announced the visit Trump said he had canceled, but the president was widely expected to attend a ceremony next month to dedicate the new embassy. Robert “Woody” Johnson, the U.S. ambassador to Britain and a friend of Trump’s, told the BBC last month he was optimistic about a visit in the new year.
Unlike other European leaders, British Prime Minister Theresa May initially went out of her way to extend a hand of friendship to the new Trump administration. She offered the president a full state visit just a week after his inauguration, prompting speculation that she was hoping to secure a good trade deal post-Brexit. But things have since grown strained.
Robin Niblett, the director of Chatham House, a London think tank, said that U.S.-British relations are “buffeted” by Trump’s moods. He noted that on some matters, such as the day-to-day business of security cooperation between the two countries, the relationship is good but that on big foreign policy issues — such as the Paris climate agreement or the Iran nuclear deal — it is tense.
“A personal relationship between Trump and May should be there to cover some of those differences in strategic approach, but it just can’t,” he said, adding that Trump is “constantly looking for new excuses not to come.”
Some foreign policy analysts in Washington suggested Trump and May could meet this year on the sidelines of summits in other countries, and one suggested Trump could visit a smaller city in Britain, perhaps one that included one of his golf resorts.
“It is extraordinary that the president of the United States cannot visit Britain over the fear of mass protests,” said Thomas Wright, director of the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “That’s unprecedented.”
Julie Smith, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security who served as deputy national security adviser for Vice President Joe Biden, called it “a sorry state of play.”
“It says a lot about where our relationship is with the U.K. and how thin-skinned our president is,” she said.
Smith scoffed at the idea that Trump was worried about the cost and location of the embassy, noting that the move has been in the works for years.
The old embassy is in elegant Mayfair, an area dotted with foreign embassies and close to West End department stores. The area is full of residential buildings, and neighbors were apt to complain about the threat to their homes.
Robert H. Tuttle, who served as U.S. ambassador to Britain from 2005 to 2009, said he knew early on that the mission would need to move.
“There were two narrow side streets by the embassy,” he said in an interview. “They are very slim, and if someone came down there with a truck, a la the Oklahoma City bombing, it would not only blow up half the embassy and kill half the people in it, but it would also kill half the people in nearby residences.”
Johnson, the current ambassador, agreed that security concerns after Sept. 11, 2001, necessitated the move. The new, bigger embassy is in Nine Elms, a former industrial area in Battersea, south of the River Thames. It’s as close to Westminster as the old embassy.
Posted on September 4, 2014by Royal Rosamond Press
Rena’s late husband, Ian Easton, was the head of British Defense Staff in Washington that has been working behind the scenes, making sure British and American interests are aligned. Our President has to take in the anti-war movement in both nations as he prepares to battle a common enemy. Rena has a unique perspective in regards to the men she has bonded with. Her worldview is extremely important. But she is a recluse. I bid her to dig deep and bring forth her dream of a beautiful world, yet to be. If WE give up now, then all that is ugly in the world, has won the war before it has begun. We must seize the day, and make over the world in our best image, for it is on the brink of ruin. their town.
The British Defence Staff – US, which was previously known as British Defence Staff (Washington),[1] is the home of the Ministry of Defence (United Kingdom) in the United States of America and its purpose is to serve the interests of Her Majesty’s Government in the USA. The British Defence Staff – US is led by the Defence Attaché and has responsibility for military and civilian MOD personnel located both within the Embassy and in 34 states across the USA.
Rosamond Press 
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