B-2 bombers hit IRGC underground HQ near Tehran

U.S. Central Command’s top officer directed a strike against an underground Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps headquarters near Tehran while American forces were simultaneously conducting a rescue operation for a downed airman inside Iran, high-level U.S. defense sources told Fox News on Monday.

Admiral Brad Cooper, the CENTCOM commander, ordered B-2 Spirit stealth bombers to fly a round-trip mission from Whiteman Air Force Base in the continental United States after receiving time-sensitive intelligence pinpointing the location of a large number of senior IRGC commanders inside the underground bunker in Tehran. The bombers then dropped Massive Ordnance Penetrators — the heavy bunker-busting weapons — on the facility.

Fox News correspondent Trey Yingst, the network’s chief foreign correspondent, reported the details Monday based on high-level U.S. sources.

According to those sources, the IRGC headquarters was obliterated. The Pentagon and U.S. Central Command had not issued any official comment on the strike as of Monday.

The operation took place in between two separate rescue events: U.S. forces ultimately recovered two service members whose F-15E had been downed, and Cooper ordered the B-2 strike during the window separating those two rescues. The round-trip flight from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri — the only base from which B-2 bombers regularly operate — represents a journey of approximately 36 hours, underscoring the degree of pre-positioning and planning required to execute such a strike on short notice.

A senior military source told Fox News bluntly: “We delivered the heat” on the IRGC. Separately, U.S. B-1 bombers, known by the callsign “Bones,” dropped approximately 100 two-thousand-pound bombs during the rescue operations, with the explicit purpose of keeping Iranian forces away from the rescue area.

OSINT analysts subsequently worked to identify the approximate location of the targeted facility. According to open-source assessments, the underground IRGC headquarters struck by the B-2A Spirit bombers on April 3 may have been situated in the mountainous Jamaran district in northern Tehran — though this location assessment has not been officially confirmed by the U.S. government.

The Massive Ordnance Penetrator, designated the GBU-57A/B, is the largest non-nuclear bomb in the U.S. arsenal. Weighing approximately 30,000 pounds, it is designed specifically to defeat hardened, deeply buried targets that conventional munitions cannot reach. Only the B-2A Spirit stealth bomber is capable of carrying and delivering the weapon, largely because of the MOP’s sheer size and the B-2’s unique internal payload capacity. The bomb uses GPS guidance to burrow through tens of feet of reinforced concrete before detonating. It was developed precisely because adversaries such as Iran have spent years constructing hardened underground facilities intended to survive conventional air attacks.

The strike employed the same weapon and the same aircraft type used in Operation Midnight Hammer, the U.S. strike campaign conducted the previous year against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. That precedent is significant: the reuse of the MOP against a command-and-control target rather than a nuclear site signals that U.S. commanders view the weapon as a flexible tool against the full spectrum of hardened Iranian facilities, not solely those associated with Iran’s nuclear program.

Following the rescues, President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social: “We have rescued the seriously wounded, and really brave, F-15 Crew Member/Officer, from deep inside the mountains of Iran. The Iranian Military was looking hard, in big numbers, and getting close. He is a highly respected Colonel. This type of raid is seldom attempted because of the danger to ‘man and machine.’ It just doesn’t happen!”

The IRGC — the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — functions as a parallel military structure within Iran, distinct from the conventional Iranian Armed Forces. It answers directly to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei rather than to the elected government, and is responsible for Iran’s ballistic missile program, its proxy networks across the Middle East, and the protection of the regime itself. Targeting its underground command infrastructure carries a different strategic weight than striking conventional military assets: it strikes at the nerve center through which Iran coordinates its most sensitive and high-stakes operations.