Culture Society, Identity and Belonging
Four days before the US launched lethal airstrikes on Houthi targets in Yemen this month, a prominent journalist got a heads-up on a public messaging platform.
This wasn’t a hint or a nudge from a covert source. It was a blow-by-blow message stream from the vice president of the United States, the US defence secretary, the US secretary of state, the White House national security adviser, a senior CIA official, the White House chief of staff and 12 other senior administration officials, sharing highly sensitive military planning information on a Signal group chat.
Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of the Atlantic, was added by mistake, never asked to identify himself and not missed when he left the group even though everyone would have been notified of his departure.
Besides information that could have helped an adversary, the participants shared views on “European free-loading” (“It’s PATHETIC,” wrote the account belonging to the defense secretary Pete Hegseth; “I just hate bailing Europe out again,” wrote the account belonging to the vice president JD Vance) and on the optics of bombing the Houthis (“there’s a real risk the public doesn’t understand this or why it’s necessary,” the Vance account wrote).
The group’s rationale for bombing the Houthis was to keep open Red Sea shipping lanes leading to and from the Suez canal even though, as Vance noted, only 3 per cent of US trade uses it whereas 40 per cent of European trade does. Hence the angina about helping Europe, exacerbated in Vance’s view by a worry that his boss, President Trump, didn’t realise that in doing so he was sending mixed messages. “I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this [bombing plan] is with his message on Europe right now,” the Vance account wrote.
The White House confirmed Goldberg had been inadvertently added to the group, but when asked about the lapse Trump said he knew nothing about it.
Experts quoted in Goldberg’s account said federal officials were supposed to use a “sensitive compartmented information facility” or Scif to share classified information and were prohibited under record-keeping laws from using electronic messaging apps unless the messages were “promptly forwarded to an official government account”.
Will the participants in this conversation be sanctioned for it? The chances are slim to vanishing.
Will it embarrass the president? It should – he built a large part of his 2016 campaign around claims Hillary Clinton had misused a private email account – but there’s little sign it will.
A National Security Council spokesman said the thread showed “deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials”.
Photo credit: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
