How a Signal Chat and a Botched Response Shattered U.S. Credibility
Last week the world learned that the senior-most national security officials in the U.S. government committed a massive security failure that has damaged American credibility in the world and given adversaries a clearer window into American military and intelligence sources and methods.
The administration’s response is a case study in how NOT to handle a crisis, with lessons well beyond government or national security.
Just about all of the damage has been self-inflicted. And so far there has been no accountability.
Attack Plan
We first heard about this fiasco on March 24, when Atlantic Executive Editor Jeffrey Goldberg revealed that nine days earlier he had known about a pending U.S. attack on Houthi targets in Yemen two hours before the bombing began. How did he know? Because the Trump Administration’s national security leaders had texted him their war plans.
Goldberg’s Atlantic story describes how on March 11 he received a connection request to join a group on Signal, a commercial messaging app, from an account with the name Michael Waltz. He knew the name as that of the National Security Advisor, who chairs the National Security Council and who coordinates the work of the defense, intelligence, and national security agencies of the federal government. But Goldberg was skeptical. He had met Waltz, but why would a senior national security professional connect with him on a Signal app?
Then on March 13 he found that he had been added to a Signal group called “Houthi PC small group.” “PC” is government shorthand for Principals Committee, the cabinet secretaries and equivalents in a working group.
Goldberg feared he was being set up, so he laid low. He found that the group included the names of the Vice President, Secretaries of State, Defense, and Treasury; the Director of National Intelligence, who coordinates all of the nation’s intelligence services; and the CIA director, among others. Then, on March 15 when he saw that the attack on the Houthis was following the plan he had received, he realized that this was a real government group. He removed himself from the group and called the officials involved. Nine days later he published his story about receiving the plans.
The story includes references to group members’ awareness of the need for heightened security. The account named for Mike Waltz noted that updates would be sent to members on their highly-secure classified computer systems, known in government circles as “high side.” The account named for Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth remarked about his commitment to “enforce 100% OPSEC” – short for operational security.
But the text exchange was also filled with indiscretions. The planned attack was intended to prevent the Houthis in Yemen from blocking shipping through the Suez Canal. The account named for Vice President JD Vance said,
“3 percent of US trade runs through the Suez. 40 percent of European trade does.”
The participants discussed how Europe should compensate the U.S. for the cost of the operation. They considered delaying the attack. The account named for JD Vance messaged the account named for Defense Secretary Hegseth, “if you think we should do it let’s go. I just hate bailing Europe out again.”
The account named for Secretary Hegseth replied, “VP: I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC. But Mike is correct, we are the only ones on the planet (on our side of the ledger) who can do this. Nobody else even close. Question is timing. I feel like now is as good a time as any, given POTUS directive to reopen shipping lanes.”
In this initial article, Goldberg did not reveal any details of the attack plan, which his headline called a “war plan.”
Before publishing the article, Goldberg contacted many of those in the Signal chat. A spokesperson for the National Security Council confirmed the veracity of the Signal group. He described the chat as evidence of “deep and thoughtful policy coordination.” He also said they were reviewing how an unauthorized number got on the chat.
Apparently, no-one, including Waltz, was aware that a journalist had been in the group, nor aware when he stopped being part of the group.
Signal Failure
Signal is a commercially-available app that has end-to-end encryption and that allows users to have messages disappear after they have been read. But it is not secure from penetration by malicious actors, including adversaries’ intelligence services. Indeed, in February, the National Security Agency warned about the app’s vulnerabilities.
And on March 18, days before Goldberg published his article, the Pentagon had sent an advisory warning its employees that
"Russian professional hacking groups are employing the 'linked devices' features [of Signal] to spy on encrypted conversations."
It also warned, “Please note: third party messaging apps (e.g. Signal) are permitted by policy for unclassified accountability/recall exercises but are NOT approved to process or store nonpublic unclassified information."
Indeed, use of an app that permanently deletes messages is understood to be a violation of the National Records Act, which requires retention of government documents, including computer records. The Houthi PC small group Signal chat was set for all content to disappear in one week.
Discussing even unclassified national defense information is understood to be a violation of the Espionage Act. The Hill newspaper quoted a prominent national security lawyer, “you cannot argue that it was not national defense information. Waltz plainly violated [Section] 793(f) of the Espionage Act.”
The expert also noted that the Act requires that those aware of the leaking of classified information are required to report it. But those on the Signal chat did not, even after Goldberg contacted them.
Failed Response
When the article appeared, the administration went into full deny/attack/discredit/change-the-subject mode.
Defense Secretary Hegseth called Goldberg “a deceitful and highly discredited, so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again.” He added, “Nobody was texting war plans, and that’s all I have to say about that.”
The following day, Waltz denied even knowing Goldberg and suggested that he had made the whole thing up. “There’s a lot of journalists in this city who have made big names for themselves making up lies about this president… and this one in particular I’ve never met, don’t know, never communicated with, and we are looking into and reviewing how the heck he got into this room.”
That day Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told a Senate hearing,
“There was no classified material that was shared in that Signal group.”
At the same hearing CIA Director John Radcliffe said, “My communications, to be clear, in the Signal message group were entirely permissible and lawful and did not include classified information.”
President Trump also weighed in: “It wasn’t classified information.”
He also said of the Atlantic: “to me it’s a magazine that’s going out of business.”
The disavowals led Goldberg to show the receipts. On Wednesday, March 26 he and a colleague, Shane Harris, published a follow-up in the Atlantic describing their reaction to those denials: “The statements by Hegseth, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, and Trump—combined with the assertions made by numerous administration officials that we are lying about the content of the Signal texts—have led us to believe that people should see the texts in order to reach their own conclusions.”
They then revealed both the details of what Goldberg had known about the planned attack on the Houthis ahead of time, and screen shots of the actual text exchanges. At the CIA’s request, they did not publish the name of the CIA Director’s chief of staff. But they did reveal an extraordinary text by Defense Secretary Hegseth: “At 11:44 a.m. eastern time, Hegseth posted in the chat, in all caps, “TEAM UPDATE:”
The text beneath this began, ‘TIME NOW (1144et): Weather is FAVORABLE. Just CONFIRMED w/CENTCOM we are a GO for mission launch.’
Centcom, or Central Command, is the military’s combatant command for the Middle East. The Hegseth text continues:
‘1215et: F-18s LAUNCH (1st strike package)’
‘1345: ‘Trigger Based’ F-18 1st Strike Window Starts (Target Terrorist is @ his Known Location so SHOULD BE ON TIME – also, Strike Drones Launch (MQ-9s)’
‘1410: More F-18s LAUNCH (2nd strike package)’
‘1415: Strike Drones on Target (THIS IS WHEN THE FIRST BOMBS WILL DEFINITELY DROP, pending earlier ‘Trigger Based’ targets)’
‘1536 F-18 2nd Strike Starts – also, first sea-based Tomahawks launched.’
‘MORE TO FOLLOW (per timeline)’
‘We are currently clean on OPSEC’—that is, operational security.
‘Godspeed to our Warriors.’”
That is a remarkable text. It tells the timing and sequence of the launch of jets more than a half hour before they are take off, and long before they are to hit their targets. This potentially put the pilots at risk and could have allowed the people targeted by the attack to leave the area. And it is hard to miss the irony of the second-to-last sentence, “We are currently clean on OPSEC’” in what was clearly a compromised security posture.
But this text stream has left me unsettled for another reason: it strikes me as way more information than the people on that text group had a need to know. They were not in the White House Situation Room monitoring the operation. Why would the Secretary of the Treasury need to know the launch sequence and the times on target of aircraft and missiles? And if the group needed to know this, why wasn’t the update on the high-security “high side” classified computer system? This feels to me as a kind of preening by Secretary Hegseth: a form of bragging that he was a grown up; that he had operational awareness.
More Deny/Attack/Discredit/Change-the-Subject
When this second story broke the administration’s defense was to deny that such information was classified; that it wasn’t a “war plan” but an “attack plan.” Trump called it “a witch hunt.”
The New York Times reported, “National security veterans say it is almost farcical to argue that this was not classified data, at least when Mr. Hegseth sent details of the plan to the group chat. It was so sensitive that in most administrations it would even be kept off most classified systems.”
Indeed, when the story broke it elicited outrage from current and former military pilots.
Amy McGrath, who was the first woman to fly a combat mission for the Marine Corps and also the first to fly an F/A-18, who later ran for Congress and the U.S. Senate in Kentucky, tweeted, “Old F-18 pilot here with 80+ combat missions – launch times on a strike mission ARE ABSOLUTELY CLASSIFIED.”
The New York Times quoted another pilot: “’We intentionally don’t share plans with people who don’t need to know,’” said one Navy F/A-18 pilot, who has flown frequently in missions in the Middle East. ‘You don’t share what time we’re supposed to show up over a target. You don’t want to telegraph that we’re about to show up on someone’s doorstep; that’s putting your crew at risk.’”
Burning a Source?
But what followed in the Signal chat was even more remarkable. National Security Advisor Waltz declared a complete victory, congratulating the Vice President, the military commanders, and the Intelligence Community. It included, “The first target – their top missile guy – we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed.”
CBS News later reported that the Israeli government, which provided this intelligence to the U.S., was furious about the leak of these details, which may have compromised human intelligence source in Yemen.
Outrage in Europe
European leaders were also steaming, both about the fact of a security breach and what the breach revealed.
Britain’s The Telegraph newspaper posted the chats and juxtaposed a picture of Defense Secretary Hegseth with the post quoting him: “I share your loathing of European freeloading. It’s PATHETIC.”
The story continued by noting other insults to Europe by the Trump administration: “The private attacks on Europe come after the Trump administration has berated allies on the Continent for failing to spend enough on defense, and criticized countries like Britain and Germany for stifling free speech.”
Another The Telegraph story declared in the headline, “It’s over. America has ceased to be leader of the free world. Accidentally copying in a journalist to senior officials’ private thoughts about Europe was a gift of Providence.”
The story itself opened: “No more room for doubt now. It’s over. The United States has ceased to be the leader of the Western alliance.
That is the clearest and most significant message that emerges from this exchange of puerile texts – which a White House official has described as a ‘demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials’ in the administration. If describing the European nations as a bunch of pathetic free loaders is what they do when they are being thoughtful and deep, what do they say when they are being shallow and irresponsible?
Getting this glimpse into what is (or should have been) the private thinking of the Trump White House is the most remarkable gift of Providence.”
Piling On
As of this writing Trump has taken no action to discipline any of the participants in Signal chat. He said, “I don’t fire people because of fake news and because of witch hunts.”
The New York Times reported that Trump considered firing Waltz, but had chosen not to. It also said, “But for Mr. Trump, the real problem did not appear to be his national security adviser’s carelessness about discussing military plans on a commercial app, the people said. It was that Mr. Waltz may have had some kind of connection to Mr. Goldberg, a Washington journalist whom Mr. Trump loathes. The president expressed displeasure about how Mr. Waltz had Mr. Goldberg’s number in his phone.”
In the week since, with no apparent consequence to the participants, the story has continued to grow. The Washington Post reported that Waltz had used Signal chats with Cabinet members on sensitive topics. It also reported that Waltz has conducted government business over commercial Gmail accounts.
And Defense Secretary Hegseth was found to have brought his wife to sensitive talks with some of his European counterparts, and to have hired his brother into a job as liaison with the Department of Homeland Security. This week Trump confirmed his support for the Defense Secretary, saying on April 1,
“Hegseth is doing a great job. He had nothing to do with this.”
Crisis Management Failures
There are a number of takeaways from both the initial crisis and the failure to contain the crisis once it became public.
Most crises are self-inflicted, and almost all of the loss of trust in a crisis is self-inflicted. Here, the crisis itself was self-inflicted in many ways:
Senior national security officials were using an app that their own national security experts says was not appropriate for sensitive discussions. The apparent reason was to prevent having to archive the discussions on the app. This itself is a violation of the Records Act and, once a journalist was invited into the chat, of the Espionage Act.
A journalist was invited onto the app and into the group by the National Security Advisor. To this day we don’t understand why or how.
The journalist’s presence, in the form of the initials JG, was not noticed by or questioned by the participants.
Defense Secretary Hegseth’s comments about European free-loading and his detailed description of operational details on an easily-penetrated app was inappropriate.
Most failed crisis responses begin with denying the problem. Here all the players denied.
President Trump denied that the information was confidential and called the story a witch hunt.
Defense Secretary Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Gabbard, CIA Director Radcliffe all denied that there was classified information in the chat.
National Security Advisor Waltz denied that he had invited Goldberg onto the app and into the group.
Attacking the messenger often energizes the messenger. Here, Goldberg had initially held back much of the most damning parts of the texts.
When Hegseth, Waltz, and Trump personally attacked and insulted him and lied about what was said in the chat, he became energized.
It is essential to take corrective action to prevent a recurrence. Here, there has been no apparent corrective action. There have been no personnel changes despite the remarkable security failures.
There has been no commitment to stop using Signal.
The Justice Department has said it will not investigate.
It is too early to determine just how deep the damage is both to national security and to the United States’ standing in the world, including among our allies.
But this scandal is likely to be a defining crisis of Trump’s second term. And that’s saying something.
