MANY of us, often embarrassingly, have done it at some time or other. I’m talking about sending the wrong text message to the wrong person. Most of us, however, don’t share the heavy responsibility of being the US national security adviser.
In what has already been dubbed the “Signalgate” scandal, it’s hard to know where to start when expressing incredulity over the stunning disclosure that Mike Waltz and other top US officials discussed sensitive US military operations in Yemen on a Signal message group that mistakenly included journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine.
Waltz apparently set up an 18-person Signal chat group as a way of bringing together what is known as the “principals committee”, parlance for a group of high-ranking officials. Evidently, he felt it was fine to discuss the details of a top-secret plan to bomb Yemen on an open-source encrypted app that any serious teen bedroom hacker could bypass in a heartbeat.
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I mean where do you start in identifying the most staggering part of what happened here?
Is it simply that such a discussion with this level of security sensitivity took place at all on a commercial social media messaging platform or is it that Goldberg was inexplicably included in the chain of recipients?
Then there is the fact that when this enormous blunder was revealed, the White House and its allies went into collective denial with president Donald Trump – as he so often does – passing the buck by blaming what he described as a “lower level” employee working under Waltz.
This too before the fact that Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy for Russia, was in Moscow when he was added to the chat, although it is unclear if his phone was with him. If that phone was indeed with him and he was using an app like Signal, it’s hard to imagine the Russian security services missing out on what was discussed.
Watching the pre-scheduled Senate intelligence committee hearing on Tuesday where some US politicians got a chance to try for an explanation as to what went shambolically wrong was no less of a toe-curling humiliation for team Trump.
Georgia senator Jon Ossoff’s forensic and excoriating grilling of CIA director John Ratcliffe was, frankly, a joy to watch. But even Ossoff you sensed, began to get angry with the degree of obfuscation and repeated “I don’t recall” replies” thrown up by the spy chief, who looked as about as capable of leading the CIA as an average five-year-old.
Denials by Ratcliffe and US director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard that nothing classified was put at risk is patent nonsense as just about every experienced security analyst without a stake in the Trump government has made abundantly clear.
Among them is Leon Panetta, former CIA director and defence secretary, who confirmed that what was described in the report all qualifies as “war plans” and “highly classified information.”
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The extent to which this shocking breach of security has left heads spinning in Washington was summed up by Ned Price, a former US diplomat and intelligence officer who served as the deputy to the US ambassador to the United Nations from 2024 to 2025.
“The principals committee is really the apex of the national security decision-making process within the US government,” Price told Foreign Policy magazine in an interview.
“The idea that this type of discussion would be held on a commercial application that is susceptible to hacking and penetration by state and non-state actors is totally mind-boggling,” Price explained. “There is no such thing as secure communication except for one venue, and that is classified US government systems.”
But even as the search for answers as to what actually went wrong continues, a few things have already become crystal clear. The most obvious of these – which should come as no great surprise – is that so many of Trump’s appointees made on the basis of their loyalty to him are simply out of their depth or not fit for purpose.
Warnings about this were of course made in the wake of Trump’s inauguration but are now being fully and frighteningly realised. For here we have yet another example of Trump appointees, loyalists and close associates simply ignoring the laws in place to prevent the leak of classified information. Legal experts have already suggested that disclosing operational details on a non-secure medium could in fact violate the US Espionage Act.
It’s hardly surprising then that Signalgate is already sending shockwaves through the intelligence communities of many US allies including Israel, with one former senior Mossad official telling the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz that, “this should serve as a major warning sign about how much we can trust US intelligence during president Donald Trump’s second term.”
The prevailing view it would seem is that if America is so incompetent in handling its own intelligence, heaven knows how much it plays fast and loose with its allies’ security data.
Almost certainly allies will again question what intelligence they are prepared to share with Washington in future. I can’t imagine for example the other members of the Five Eyes alliance alongside the US, which includes the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, being the most trusting right now.
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Other European countries too must increasingly wonder the extent to which Washington could be said to constitute what could actually be deemed an “ally” these days.
If the messages in the Signalgate exchanges confirmed anything beyond plans to bomb Yemen, it’s the extent to which Waltz and other cabinet-level officials expressed contempt for Europeans and insisted that allies should foot the bill for American military action in Yemen.
Everywhere you look right now, Trump’s administration seems hell-bent on an act of self-harm when it comes to America’s standing in the world. I know I should be alarmed and in some ways I am.
But I’m a little envious too of the material – courtesy of the ineptitude of the likes of Waltz, JD Vance and others in the Trump administration – that dropped into the lap of fellow journalist Jeffrey Goldberg. Talk about a gift from the journalist gods?
In that sense perhaps we should all be a bit grateful for the gormlessness of those on Waltz’s “chat group”. For if nothing else, Signalgate has well and truly confirmed what many of us always suspected – clueless, dangerous amateurs now inhabit the White House.
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