The editor-in-chief of The Atlantic was accidentally added to a group text message between key national security advisers as they discussed an upcoming offensive strike in Yemen — and nobody seemed to know he was there until after the bombs went off.
In an editorial about the stunning breach, The Atlantic‘s EIC Jeffrey Goldberg explained that he thought he was being pranked earlier in March when he was added to a Signal chat titled “Houthi PC small group” that seemed to contain users with handles corresponding to vice president JD Vance, secretary of state Marco Rubio, and defense secretary Pete Hegseth.
The debacle began on March 11 when Goldberg received a Signal message request from a “Michael Waltz,” the name of Trump’s national security adviser. The two had met before, but the Atlantic editor doubted the person who added him was the real Waltz because Trump has a personal beef with Goldberg.
A few days later, the Houthi group chat was created. Along with Golberg, the Waltz account included users with handles related to Rubio, Vance, and Hegseth, as well as ones the editor took to be Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and other cabinet officials. The “PC” in the chat’s name seemed to reference the “principals committee,” which is fed-speak for the most senior national security officials.
In short, it seemed that the group chat Goldberg had been added to either was an unauthorized digital meeting place for the National Security Council — or a very good attempt at faking it.
Before his eyes, the nation’s top national security advisers began discussing their various takes on whether the United States should bomb Houthi rebels in Yemen in retaliation for their piracy in the Suez Canal. Though Goldberg was still incredulous, he began to notice the messages in the spirited back-and-forth “sounded as if they were written by the people who purportedly sent them, or by a particularly adept AI text generator.”
“If it was a hoax,” the Atlantic EIC wrote, “the quality of mimicry and the level of foreign-policy insight were impressive.”
The morning of the strikes, the Hegseth account sent a message that contained so much “operational detail” about the Yemen bombing campaign that Goldberg reckoned it “could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel” had it been viewed by an adversary instead of a perplexed journalist.
Later that day, after the strikes went off and unofficial death counts began trickling in, Golberg was forced to admit to himself that the Signal group chat “was almost certainly real.” He then was compelled to remove himself from it, which invariably triggered an announcement that his account, dubbed only “J G,” had left the chat.
When Goldberg contacted the affected parties to see what was up, National Security Council spokesman Brian Hughes admitted, incredibly, that what he’d sent “appears to be an authentic message chain.”
“We are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain,” Hughes said, before adding that the “thread is a demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials.”
Legal experts that The Atlantic spoke to, meanwhile, suggested that such classified information being shared on Signal, a non-authorized chat app, was bad enough between officials — and that adding in a journalist made the entire thing tantamount to a leak.
The whole thing is made even more extrardinary by Trump’s harping, during the 2016 election, on his opponent Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server — whereas his own top staff are now planning military operations on a private messaging app.
Incredibly, Hegseth and the other people in the seemingly unofficial and unauthorized National Security Council meeting seemed to be aware that privacy was paramount. At one point, Hegseth even claimed, while Goldberg watched silently on his phone, that the mission was “currently clean on [operations security].”
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