The planes that flew west over the Pacific were “a deception effort known only to an extremely small number of planners and key leaders,” Gen Caine said.
“The main strike package comprised of seven B-2 spirit bombers, each with two crew members, proceeded quietly to the east with minimal communications,” he added.
Those military planes don’t show up on flight tracking websites, making it difficult for the BBC to independently verify the Pentagon’s description of the events.
And although satellite images can help show the extent of damage at the sites overnight, they can’t tell us the exact times when they were hit.
When the fleet made it to the Middle East, sometime around 17:00 EDT (22:00 BST), it was joined by support aircraft that helped protect the bombers by sweeping in front of them to look for enemy fighters and surface-to-air missile threats, in what Gen Caine called a “complex, tightly timed manoeuvre”.
But Iranian fighter jets didn’t take off and no air defences appeared to fire a shot, according to US officials.
“Israeli dominance over Iranian airspace primed the pump for American bombers to operate with impunity,” Patrycja Bazylczyk, a missile defence expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC, told BBC Verify.
The next hour and forty minutes were described by Gen Caine during the Pentagon briefing in a level of detail not normally disclosed to the public.
Although the briefing provided timings for certain events, the map showing the bombers’ journey wasn’t a specific flight path and differed slightly in two versions presented.
The Trump administration has proclaimed the subsequent events as a total victory, claiming the US had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear regime. But the true extent of the damage, and its aftermath, has yet to be measured.
While Iran has confirmed the attacks, it has minimised the extent of the damage and has not provided a specific account of the sequence of events.
At around 17:00 EDT (22:00 BST) US officials say more than two dozen Tomahawk land attack cruise missiles were launched from a US submarine stationed in the Arabia Sea towards the nuclear site near Isfahan, a city of about two million people.
While the nuclear facility there is hundreds of kilometres inland, the submarines were close enough to enable the cruise missiles to impact at roughly the same time as the stealthy B-2s dropped their “bunker buster” bombs over the other two nuclear sites, said Dr Stacie Pettyjohn, a defence expert at the Center for a New American Security.
It all meant that the US was able to provide “a coordinated surprise attack on multiple sites”, she told BBC Verify.
Meanwhile, the fleet of bombers entered Iranian airspace, where the US employed several other deception tactics, including more decoys, according to the Pentagon.
Then the air strikes began.
The lead bomber dropped two GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator weapons – known as MOPs – on the first of several targets at Fordo at about 18:40 EDT (23:40 BST), just after 02:00 in the morning in Iran.
The MOP bomb is able to drop through about 18m (60ft) of concrete or 61m (200ft) of earth before exploding, according to experts. This means that although it’s not guaranteed success, it is the only bomb in the world that could come close to impacting the depth of tunnels at the Fordo facility – thought to be 80-90m (262-295ft) below the surface.
It was the first time the “bunker buster” bombs were ever dropped in a real combat operation.
