US President Donald Trump claimed on Wednesday that a secret military mission moved more than 100 million barrels of oil and 200 commercial ships through the Strait of Hormuz, but accounts from his own officials point to a far smaller operation.
'Last month, I directed our Great US Military to execute a secret mission to support Oil Tankers and other Commercial Ships through the Strait of Hormuz,' the president wrote on Truth Social, insisting that the US, not Iran, 'controls' the waterway.
He credited the clandestine flows with keeping crude near $90 (£67) per barrel instead of surging past $200 (£149), and said he revealed the operation only because Iran had 'figured it out'.
What Officials Actually Counted
The arithmetic inside his own administration tells a different story. A US official described the effort as a coordination scheme rather than a naval escort, with shippers contacting US Central Command to receive guidance on where to transit safely.
Approximately 70 commercial ships had been guided through the strait as of late last month, US officials said, a figure first reported by The New York Times and confirmed by ABC News. Many of those vessels switched off their transponders to avoid detection by Iranian forces.
A defence official told CNBC last week that US forces are not escorting vessels at all, only communicating with ships that want to move through Hormuz safely.
A Mission Scrapped Once Before
The muddle has history. In early May, Trump announced an escort operation called Project Freedom to free tankers stranded in the Persian Gulf, then scrapped it after barely a day. Officials later hinted that the Navy was quietly assisting ships but never disclosed the scale.
In the Oval Office on Wednesday, the president added another figure to the pile, telling reporters the US 'took' 22 ships carrying millions of barrels through the strait on a single recent night.
The Billion Barrel Hole in the Market
The stakes behind the numbers are huge. Before the war with Iran began on 28 February, roughly 20 million barrels per day, around 20% of global supply, passed through Hormuz. The effective closure has since cost the market more than 1 billion barrels, the largest supply disruption in history.
JPMorgan estimated in a 4 June note that around 2 million barrels per day may be slipping out on tankers running dark, with analysts writing that 'surprising volumes of crude and petroleum products' still appear to be transiting the strait.
Ship traffic remains well below pre-war levels, according to Helima Croft, global head of commodity strategy at RBC Capital Markets, who told CNBC the world is still losing significant volumes of oil every day.
Why the Gap Matters at the Pump
Those hidden flows are a large part of the reason petrol prices and energy bills have not climbed even higher. If the real volume sits closer to the officials' 70 ships than the president's 200, the market is getting less oil than advertised, and prices have further to rise.
The claims also landed against an awkward economic backdrop. Trump told reporters he loved the latest inflation figures even though the consumer price index has risen 4.2% over the past 12 months, with energy costs feeding the squeeze on households heading into winter.
For now, the only certainty is the gap itself. The president says 200 ships and 100 million barrels. His officials count roughly 70 vessels. Somewhere between those numbers sits the answer to what drivers will pay at the pump in the months ahead.
