It’s been a hell of a week. As such, this is a special edition of the Pentagon Rundown that focuses solely on the continuing debate within the national security community about whether Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth improperly shared classified information about pending air and missile strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen.
Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, first reported on Monday that he had inadvertently been invited to join a group chat on the Signal messaging app that included Hegseth and other top officials from President Donald Trump’s administration. Goldberg also wrote that Hegseth had shared “war plans” with the chat group on March 15 about forthcoming strikes in Yemen. (The phrase “war plans” has come up a lot lately. Don’t worry, we’ll come back to it further down, along with input from a former director of the CIA and NSA, as well as a military lawyer with decades of experience handling these kinds of cases.)
The message began with the words “TEAM UPDATE,” and it included details about what type of aircraft would be involved with the strikes, when planes would take off, when Tomahawk missiles would be launched, and the time when the first bombs were expected to drop, Goldberg wrote on Wednesday.
Hegseth also wrote, “We are currently clean on OPSEC,” referring to operational security. It’s already become meme fodder and even a brand of hand sanitizer.
Since the story first broke, Hegseth and other Trump administration officials have furiously argued that the information about the strikes was not classified and did not constitute “war plans.”
“So, let’s [sic] me get this straight,” Hegseth posted to X on Wednesday. “The Atlantic released the so-called ‘war plans’ and those ‘plans’ include: No names. No targets. No locations. No units. No routes. No sources. No methods. And no classified information. Those are some really shitty war plans.”
Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Hegseth appeared to confirm the authenticity of the message cited by Goldberg.
“My job, as it said atop of that, everybody has seen it now — ‘Team Update’ — is to provide updates in real time — general updates in real time, keep everyone informed,” Hegseth said. “That’s what I did.”
But Mark Zaid, a national security attorney, said he is not persuaded by Hegseth’s argument that the information about the strikes shared in the chat was too vague to be considered classified.
“Even if they had never happened, it still would have been classified for a period of time, without a doubt,” Zaid told Task & Purpose. “They were planning this strike on that specific day, with those specific aircraft, at that specific time, which could give a window into future operations.”
Zaid has decades of experience litigating Freedom of Information Act requests for classified information. He said he has “no doubt” that the information about the Yemen strikes was classified at the time Hegseth sent it.
“It’s dumbfounding to even contemplate an argument that this would not be classified,” Zaid said. “It’s reminiscent of the end of the ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ where the wizard is saying, ‘Don’t look over at the man behind the curtain,’ when you’re staring right at him.”
While Hegseth has the power to declassify information, Zaid said he believes it is not realistic that he did so before sending the message about the Yemen strikes.
“Why in the world would the secretary ever declassify sensitive military and operational plans when he thinks he’s discussing it with only his other principals?” Zaid said. “If they want to say it’s now not classified because they declassified it, that’s a separate issue. But it’s laughable to say he declassified it before or as he was sending it as part of a secret text conversation that no one in the public was ever meant to see.”
Also, the Defense Department’s declassification process involves determining when information will no longer be of any value to an adversary, which would logically be after a military strike has occurred, not before, a source with extensive knowledge of military operations told Task & Purpose.
Retired Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, who led both the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency, told Task & Purpose that he is convinced the information Hegseth shared before the strikes was classified, and perhaps may even have been Top Secret.
Top Secret is a level of classification given to information that, if disclosed without authorization, “reasonably could be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security,” according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence Classification Guide.
If an adversary had obtained that information Hegseth shared before the strikes, it is possible that U.S. military forces could have suffered casualties as a result, Hayden said.
“They said this is going to happen,” Hayden said. “They talked about drones and everything. They were naming the weapons, too. When I was CIA director, we have a lot of drones: I didn’t talk about them on the telephone.”
If Trump administration officials have been using Signal for the past two months, it is possible that Russia and China have already intercepted sensitive information sent on the messaging app, Hayden said, noting the NSA warned its employees in February that Signal is vulnerable to being exploited by U.S. adversaries.
Hayden said he has spoken with members of the U.S. intelligence community, who are appalled by Goldberg’s revelation about the Signal chat group.
“The president, the vice president, the secretary of defense, secretary of state, all of them are saying: ‘Oh, it’s OK’ — it’s not OK,” Hayden said.