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The Signal scandal that engulfed Washington last week constitutes a major breach of US national security. To say that it was an egregious error to invite a national security reporter into deliberations of a National Security Council (NSC) group discussing US strikes on foreign soil is an understatement, though acknowledging it as such is not something that the Trump administration has yet managed to do.
In fact, it is much worse than a mistake: it has clear costs for national security and counterintelligence. The nature of the information that senior Trump administration officials disclosed over the unclassified messaging app Signal—involving US National Security council planning for military action in Yemen—undoubtedly put U.S. troops in danger. (There is no way this information should have been shared on anything other than a classified system. Think about it this way: if the U.S. intelligence community was able to steal similar information from a foreign adversary, would the U.S. government hold that information tightly and classify it as top secret? The answer is obviously “yes.”)
The Signal scandal that engulfed Washington last week constitutes a major breach of US national security. To say that it was an egregious error to invite a national security reporter into deliberations of a National Security Council (NSC) group discussing US strikes on foreign soil is an understatement, though acknowledging it as such is not something that the Trump administration has yet managed to do.
In fact, it is much worse than a mistake: it has clear costs for national security and counterintelligence. The nature of the information that senior Trump administration officials disclosed over the unclassified messaging app Signal—involving US National Security council planning for military action in Yemen—undoubtedly put U.S. troops in danger. (There is no way this information should have been shared on anything other than a classified system. Think about it this way: if the U.S. intelligence community was able to steal similar information from a foreign adversary, would the U.S. government hold that information tightly and classify it as top secret? The answer is obviously “yes.”)
But this is not the first time that senior White House officials have accidentally disclosed classified information to US journalists. From a historical perspective, accidental release of classified information is, as the military like to say, Situation Normal All F*cked Up (SNAFU). History is littered with examples of press briefings gone wrong, as well as e-mail screw ups, involving sensitive U.S. intelligence.
Back in 2019, then US National Security adviser, John Bolton, inadvertently displayed a yellow legal pad with a handwritten note stating quote “5000 troops to Colombia” clearly visible to the press. The note led to speculation and confusion, and an official response stating that the note represented all options being on the table, rather than specifics of an actual military plan. In 2022 President Joe Biden let slip a hitherto undisclosed detail of US support for Ukraine, when he stated that American troops were training Ukrainian forces in Poland, the first public confirmation of such training.
In 2014, the Obama White House accidentally disclosed the identity of the CIA’s chief of station in Afghanistan in an email distributed to the press pool. The email was rapidly withdrawn and press outlets urged not to publish the CIA officer’s name, but the officer was withdrawn from Kabul for security purposes.
One of the strangest disclosures of highly sensitive information occurred on the eve of D-Day, in June 1944. In the days before the allied invasion of Europe, a series of highly classified codenames mysteriously appeared in The Daily Telegraph’s crossword puzzle, including UTAH, OMAHA, OVERLORD, NEPTUNE, and MULBERY, all of which were codenames relating to the D-Day invasion, OVERLORD. MI5 was immediately called in to investigate, including the background of the crossword author.
The agency could find no indication of espionage and concluded that it was simply a coincidence. Years later, however, it transpired that the crossword puzzle maker, a teacher, relied on students to help with the crossword answers. It is possible that the school children overheard soldiers stationed nearby inadvertently using the D-Day codenames. If so, it was a striking example of operational insecurity.
New forms of digital communication, like Signal, make accidents more likely, not less. As Signalgate reveals, a wrong person can be added to a group with the flick of a finger.
And there is a qualitative difference between Signalgate and the examples listed above, like John Bolton’s accidentally visible handwritten classified note. The former provided journalists with fragmentary snapshots into classified discussions. Signalgate offered real time observation of those discussions, of the kind that a hostile intelligence service could only dream of. Signalgate is the equivalent of a national security advisor inviting a journalist to sit in the corner of a secure facility (SCIF) during a NSC meeting.
Or, to put it another way, it would be like the Nixon White House inviting Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein into the room where Watergate was being planned. The ease of Signal communications risks creating a situation that is not just SNAFU, but as the military also likes to say, F*cked Up Beyond All Recognition (FUBAR).
The real FUBAR question lurking behind the Signal scandal is whether other small group chats exist in which senior U.S. officials are likewise making policy with lethal consequences, away from oversight and about which no record is being kept. And if such groups do exist, have other third parties, with malign intent, been accidentally added to them too?
Although Signal is an encrypted messaging service, offering end to end encryption, there is no such thing as a perfect form of encryption. Even the most advanced service is unable to overcome human error, which occurred here. (The use of professional communications experts on staff does, however, minimize the risk of human error). Signal’s end to end encryption also does not mean that third parties are unable to get into it.
If a third party can gain access to the endpoints of the communication, namely a phone, it may be possible to observe the encrypted communications at that end point. There have also been whispers within western intelligence communities that agencies can introduce “ghost” third parties into encrypted messaging groups. A truly worrying development occurred on Thursday last ohh week, when Der Spiegel reported that Michael Waltz’s passwords have been identified in leaked datasets online.
It is impossible to say for certain whether the Trump administration has been responsible for more security breaches than previous administrations, but that is the unmistakable impression. Signalgate is the latest episode involving Trump’s lack of security for US national secrets. In his first administration, Trump disclosed highly sensitive intelligence to the Russian ambassador in the US, and Russia’s foreign minister, relating to Iran, which reportedly was derived from Israeli intelligence.
The legitimate fear at the time was that the Russian recipients of this intelligence in the Oval Office would inform Russia’s Middle Eastern ally, Iran. In 2019, Trump tweeted a highly sensitive photo from a US spy satellite of a launch site in Iran, to the consternation of his intelligence briefers.
At the end of his first term, Trump spirited boxes of papers containing some of the most highly classified U.S. secrets to his Florida estate, Mar -a-Lago, where they were left stacked in unsecured bathrooms another places. It is a fair assumption that the secrets in those papers are known to any decent foreign intelligence service in the world, either by recruited guests or staff at Mar-a-Lago.
The Trump administration’s recent firing of officials at the Department of Energy, whose job was to safeguard the US nuclear arsenal, and then their quick rehiring, provides the unmistakable impression that the second Trump White House is not following a well thought through strategy to safeguard U.S. national secrets.
In normal times, a US administration would be launching an investigation into Signalgate. But these are not normal times. The US attorney general, Pam Bondi, has stated she does not plan to investigate. FUBAR indeed.
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