How did a journalist end up receiving secret US war plans in a group chat?

US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth disclosed war plans in an encrypted group chat that included a journalist two hours before US troops launched attacks against the Houthi militia in Yemen, the White House said on Monday (March 24), confirming an account in the magazine The Atlantic.The editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, wrote in an article published on Monday that he was mistakenly added to the text chat on the commercial messaging app Signal by Michael Waltz, the US national security adviser.It was an extraordinary breach of US national security intelligence. Not only was the journalist inadvertently included in the group, but the conversation also took place outside the secure government channels that would normally be used for classified and highly sensitive war planning.Goldberg said he was able to follow the conversation among senior members of US President Donald Trump’s national security team in the two days leading up to the strikes in Yemen. The group also included US Vice President JD Vance and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Goldberg wrote. 119470534At 11:44am on March 15, Hegseth posted the “operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the US would be deploying and attack sequencing,” Goldberg wrote. “The information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East.”In an interview, Goldberg said that “up until the Hegseth text on Saturday, it was mainly procedural and policy texting. Then it became war plans, and to be honest, that sent a chill down my spine.”Goldberg did not publish the details of the war plans in his article.Hegseth, Goldberg wrote, said that “the first detonations in Yemen would be felt two hours hence, at 1:45pm Eastern time. So I waited in my car in a supermarket parking lot.”“If this Signal chat was real, I reasoned, Houthi targets would soon be bombed,” he added.At around 1:55, initial airstrikes hit buildings in neighborhoods in and around Sanaa, Yemen’s capital, that were known Houthi leadership strongholds, according to Pentagon officials and residents. The strikes continued throughout that Saturday and into the next few days. medium119470732Hegseth, Goldberg wrote, declared to the group — which included the journalist — that steps had been taken to keep the information secret.“We are currently clean on OPSEC,” Hegseth wrote, using the military acronym for operational security.Several Defence Department officials expressed shock that Hegseth had put US war plans into a commercial group chat. They said that having this type of conversation in a Signal chat group itself could be a violation of the Espionage Act, a law covering the handling of sensitive information.Revealing operational war plans before planned strikes could also put US troops directly into harm’s way, the officials said. And former FBI officials who worked on leak cases described this as a devastating breach of national security. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive national security matter.Former national security officials said that if personal cellphones were used in the group chat, the behaviour would be even more egregious because of ongoing Chinese hacking efforts.Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said the “story represents one of the most egregious failures of operational security and common sense I have ever seen”.“Military operations need to be handled with utmost discretion and precision, using approved secure lines of communication, because American lives are on the line,” he added.Republican senators faced a barrage of questions. Many said they were concerned, but most were withholding judgment until they could receive a full briefing.“It appears that mistakes were made, no question,” said Senator Roger Wicker, R-Miss., chair of the Armed Services Committee. “We’ll try to get to ground truth and take appropriate action.”Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, said on CNN that his panel would send an inquiry to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and then determine whether a fuller investigation is warranted.But Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., dismissed the idea of additional investigations or discipline for the officials involved. “I’m told they’re doing an investigation to find out how that number was included, and that should be that,” Johnson told reporters at the US Capitol, referring to White House officials. “I’m not sure that it requires much additional attention.”Trump, speaking to reporters at the White House, said he had no knowledge of the article in The Atlantic. “I don’t know anything about it,” he said. “You’re telling me about it for the first time.”The Pentagon referred questions about the article to the National Security Council. Hegseth was traveling to Hawaii on Monday, his first stop on a weeklong trip to Asia. He spoke to reporters traveling with him after landing in Hawaii, called Goldberg a “so-called journalist” and, when pressed, said that “nobody was texting war plans, and that’s all I have to say about that”.But the White House appeared to contradict him. “At this time, the message thread that was reported appears to be authentic, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain,” Brian Hughes, the National Security Council spokesperson, said in an emailed statement. He called the thread “a demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials”.During his first term, Trump repeatedly said Hillary Clinton, his Democratic rival in the 2016 election, should have been imprisoned for using a private email server to communicate with her staff and others while she was secretary of state. Waltz, for his part, posted on social media in June 2023: “Biden’s sitting National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan sent Top Secret messages to Hillary Clinton’s private account. And what did DOJ [Department of Justice] do about it? Not a damn thing.”In his many television appearances before he became defence secretary, Hegseth also excoriated Clinton for using the private email server. Across social media on Monday, those criticisms were reappearing. “Hey @petehegseth_DOD, this you?” read one post, accompanying a video of Hegseth on Fox Business saying that Clinton “betrayed her country” for “convenience”.Clinton, for her part, reposted the Atlantic story on social media with one comment: “You have got to be kidding me.”