Two hours before the first bombs started falling on Houthi targets across Yemen, Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief at the Atlantic, had been accidentally added to a secret Signal group with top Donald Trump cabinet members discussing the upcoming attacks.
Goldberg disclosed a massive blunder of the US Operations Security (OPSEC). He was accidentally added to a top-secret Signal group chat where top US officials were discussing upcoming US strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen on March 15th, 2025.
The journalist received detailed war plans, including information about targets, weapons packages, and attack sequencing hours before the actual strikes commenced.
“Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, had texted me the war plan at 11:44 a.m.,” Goldberg explains.
It started two days before the war discussions when Goldberg received a connection request from National Security Advisor Michael Waltz. The journalist had accepted the request, hoping that Waltz would share details about Ukraine, Iran, or other important matters.
However, two days later, Goldberg was inadvertently included in a Signal chat group called the “Houthi PC small group.”
The group had 18 individuals listed. Among them Goldberg identified MAR (presumably the secretary of State Marco Antonio Rubio), JD Vance, TG (an acronym for Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence), and Scott B (likely Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent). One account seemed to match Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) John Ratcliffe. There were other various National Security Council officials.
“I didn’t think it could be real. Then the bombs started falling,” Goldberg’s article reads.
“In my many years of reporting on national-security matters, I had never heard of one being convened over a commercial messaging app.”
While Signal offers strong end-to-end encryption and is often used by officials, journalists, political activists, and others for private conversations, it is not approved for sharing sensitive US government information. The app also doesn’t protect from any vulnerabilities that the phone it is installed on may contain.
The incident sparked widespread criticism
The journalist's inadvertent addition and the use of an open-source messaging application, Signal, for top-secret military operations sparked a wave of bipartisan outrage.
“You have got to be kidding me,” Hillary Clinton, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate, secretary of state, and former first lady, posted on X.
👀 You have got to be kidding me.https://t.co/IhhvFvw6DG pic.twitter.com/bnNG4dGSpI
undefined Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) March 24, 2025
Senator Jack Reed, a leading Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, shared a statement calling for a thorough investigation.
“If true, this story represents one of the most egregious failures of operational security and common sense I have ever seen,” Reed said.
Wesh.com quotes Senator Roger Wicker, the Mississippi Republican who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, as saying, “We’re very concerned about it, and we’ll be looking into it on a bipartisan basis.”
“Trump's national security team's chat app leak is a stunning failure,” writes Anthony Zurcher, BBC North America correspondent.
The Trump administration acknowledged that the conversations seem authentic and stated that they’re reviewing how Goldberg was added.
US President Donald Trump said he was hearing about it for the first time, and mentioned that the attack on the Houthis “was very effective.”
“I don’t know anything about it. I’m not a big fan of The Atlantic. To me, it’s a magazine that's going out of business,” Trump told reporters.
“I know nothing about it.”
From an operational security perspective, this is the highest level of fuckup imaginable. These people cannot keep America safe. https://t.co/xhYuJXAenx
undefined Pete Buttigieg (@PeteButtigieg) March 24, 2025
Politico reports that Hegseth disputes the claims and downplays the significance of the leaked messages, saying “Nobody was texting war plans.”
Security advisors and lawyers are raising concerns about the use of Signal and potential other violations of the Espionage Act and federal records law when discussing sensitive military operations. This undermines trust in how the government handles national security information.
The wider leakage of sensitive information could put American troops and strategic operations at risk if adversaries were to intercept the messages. In the leaked chats, Hegseth even boasted “I will do all we can to enforce 100% OPSEC.”
The US was fortunate to dodge even graver consequences because Goldberg refrained from including the most sensitive operational details that could have jeopardized national security, disclosing only a portion of internal communications in the public interest.
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