US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth has said President Trump directed the most complex and secretive military operation in history, and it was a “resounding success”, resulting in a ceasefire agreement and ending the 12-day war.

“There’s been a lot of discussion about what happened and what didn’t happen,” he said while addressing a press conference at the State Department, adding that President Trump created the conditions to end the war by “decimating” Iran’s nuclear capabilities.

“Every outlet has breathlessly reported on a preliminary assessment from DIA. It was preliminary, a day and a half after the actual strike, when it admitted that it requires weeks to accumulate the necessary data to make such an assessment.

“It points out it has not been coordinated with the intel community at all. There’s low confidence in the report. It says in the report that there are gaps in the info … multiple lynchpin assumptions in this report. What that means is … if you’re wrong, everything else is wrong. This report acknowledges that there is severe damage.”

Hegseth said the report was leaked because “someone had an agenda to try and muddy the waters and make it look like this historic strike wasn’t successful”.

“There are so many aspects of what our brave men and women did that, because of the hatred of this press corps, are undermined, because you’re trying to leak and spin that it wasn’t successful. It’s irresponsible,” he added.

Hegseth said it was a “historically successful attack and it gives us a chance to have peace” and an opportunity to prevent a nuclear Iran, which is “something President Trump talked about for 20 years and which no president has had the courage to do.”