Defense Secretary Pete Hegses said he disclosed the war plans in a cryptographic chat group containing journalists two hours before launching an attack on Yemen's Hauti militia, the White House said it had confirmed its magazine accounts on Monday.
Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of the Atlantic Prime Minister, wrote in an article published Monday that it was accidentally added to a text chat on commercial messaging app signals by national security adviser Michael Waltz.
It was an extraordinary violation of American national security information. Not only were journalists mistakenly included in the group, conversations usually took place outside of safe government channels used for classified, highly sensitive war plans.
Goldberg said he was able to follow the conversation between senior members of President Trump's national security team in the two days leading up to the Yemen strike. The group also included Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Goldberg wrote.
At 11:44am on March 15th, Hegses posted “operational details of upcoming strikes in Yemen, including information on targets, US deployed weapons and attack sequences.” “The information they contain could have been used to injure the US troops and intelligence agents, especially in the wider Middle East, if they had been read by US enemies.”
In an interview, Goldberg said, “Up to Heggs' texts on Saturday, it was primarily a procedural and policy text message. It became a war plan and honestly, it cooled my spine.
Goldberg did not publish details of the war plan in his article.
Mr. Goldberg said: “They're the ones who are in the process of doing this.”
“We reasoned that if this signal chat was real, Houthi's target would be bombed soon,” he added.
Pentagon officials and residents said they crashed into a nearby building in Yemen's capital Sana and its surrounding area around 1:55. The strike continued throughout that Saturday and up to several days.
Goldberg wrote: Hegses declared to the group that measures had been taken to keep the information confidential:
“We are now clean at OPSEC,” writes Hegseth using the military acronym for operational security.
Several Department of Defense officials expressed shock that Hegses had put American war plans into a commercial chat group. They said that having this type of conversation in the signalling chat group itself could be a violation of spying, a law that covers the handling of sensitive information.
Clearing operational war plans before a planned strike could directly harm the US military, officials said. They spoke about the terms of anonymity and discussed sensitive national security issues.
“The story represents one of the worst mistakes of operational safety and common sense I've ever seen,” said Sen. Jack Reid of Rhode Island, a ranking Democrat for the Armed Services Committee.
“Because American life is on the line, military operations must be handled with the greatest discretion and accuracy using approved, secure communication lines,” he added.
The Department of Defense introduced questions about the article to the National Security Council. Hegseth was traveling to Hawaii on Monday. This is the first stop on a week's trip to Asia.
“At this point, the reported message threads appear to be authentic, and we are reviewing how careless numbers have been added to the chain,” National Security Council spokesman Brian Hughes said in an email. He called the thread “a demonstration of deep and thoughtful policy coordination among senior officials.”
Trump repeatedly said during his first term that Hillary Clinton should have been jailed using a private email server to communicate with staff and others while he was Secretary of State. Waltz posted on social media in June 2023.
