An Embarrassing Signal

A blunder caused while preparing the member list for a top-secret chat assembly named the “Houthi PC Small Group” among senior American security leaders in the Donald Trump administration through a commercial messaging platform “Signal” has embarrassed the new administration. It has also cast doubts among US allies on the level of security existing in Washington DC with which they share intelligence.

On March 24 Jeffrey Goldberg published an article in The Atlantic titled “The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plan” about the “upcoming military strikes in Yemen. I didn’t think it could be real. Then the bombs started falling”. He claimed that he knew about this “two hours before the first bombs exploded that the attack might be coming”.

On March 25 President Trump admitted that his National Security Adviser Mike Waltz who had set up the communication chain “had learnt a lesson” by wrongly including Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, a non-authorised person. He added that Waltz is a “good man”, and that the incident was the only glitch in two months” following his presidency, “and it turned out not to be a serious one.” The White House claimed on March 26 that the information shared through Signal was “not classified”.

Initially Goldberg thought that he was being lured into an “entrapment operation” to part with information or that it was a disinformation campaign by a foreign intelligence service “because I could not believe that the national-security leadership of the United States would communicate on Signal about imminent war plans”. When he came to know that the chat group was real, he removed himself from the group. However, no one noticed his presence or his departure.

Goldberg wrote to Mike Waltz and others on March 24 that he was wrongly included in the group. He added that they should have used the “sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF”. Subsequent reports suggested that Jeffrey Goldberg (JG) might have been added after being mistaken for US Trade Representative Jamieson L. Greer.

History tells us that such costly mistakes always result in serious damage to national security. When the US National Security Council system was introduced in 1947 it was meant to be a three-tier body to recommend policy options to the president, distilled through three levels, for integration of domestic, foreign and military policies.

The first level was the “Inter-Agency Group” consisting of the undersecretary level, the next the “Senior Inter-agency Group” with the Deputy Secretary status officers while the highest would be the “Principals’ Group” of cabinet officers like the Secretary of State, Defence and CIA chief.

Each President used to issue National Security Decision Directives (NSDD) on this. For example, President Ronald Reagan’s NSDD No: 2 of 12 January 1982 said that the fulcrum of this body would be the “Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs”, popularly known as NSA who would set the agenda, issue briefs, convene meetings, disseminate the President’s decisions to the concerned for execution and receive compliance of such operations. In those days procedural and document security were ensured through meetings in person.

However, 9/11 attacks on America introduced a new dimension to the need for speedier communications to disseminate intelligence, opinions and decisions. This was when electronic means came to be adopted, often without security precautions. Like in all democratic bureaucracies, the pendulum swung in the opposite direction: from a rigorously restrictive circulation of operational and intelligence matters to more widespread dissemination. A series of disasters followed.

In 2019 Jack Teixeira, the “Ukraine war intelligence leaker”, disclosed secrets on Discord, a social media messaging site popular with “gamers,” as he was accorded “Top Secret’ and “sensitive compartmented information” clearance, despite holding a comparatively low rank. However, he did not appear to have had any intentions of betraying his country. Reports suggest that he was “showing off” by posting important news, as he wanted his friends to recognise him as “OG”, their leader.

Chelsea Elizabeth Manning, the “Wikileaks” leaker who released more than 700,000 classified documents in 2010 as a “form of protest” against American wars in the Middle East, joined the army in 2007 at the age of 20. She was physically small, just five feet high and could not stand bullying by her peers. She took advantage of her “Top Secret-Sensitive Compartmentalised Security” (TSSCS) clearance where she was allowed to enter the military’s “Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility” only to see the classified documents for action.

However, she was able to illegally download a huge trove of documents on 5 January 2010, which she then transferred into her own personal computer. Later she went on downloading more documents and transferred them to the Wikileaks Drop Box through TOR, a free overlay network enabling anonymous communication. The Guardian reported on 22 October 2022 that her main motivation for leaking was because she felt that the military was misleading the American public about the Iraq War.

Similarly, Edward Snowden took advantage of the National Security Agency (NSA)’s system of allowing access to 1,000 “System Administrators”, most of them contractors. As an intelligence official cited by ABC News said then: “It’s 2013 and the NSA is stuck in 2003 technology.” In that outdated system, Snowden, then working for an NSA contractor in Honolulu, had direct access to NSA’s Fort Meade server.

Reality Leigh Winner, aged 25 years, who was working for an NSA intelligence contractor in Georgia, leaked official secrets out of a wrong sense of “patriotism” by posting it on The Intercept when she saw an NSA document on Russian interference in the 2016 US Presidential elections. It stated that the Russian Chief Intelligence Office had executed a cyber-attack on US voting software and sent “spear phishing” emails to more than 100 election officials just before the 2016 November elections. Out of “patriotic” considerations, she sent the document anonymously before the NSA verified its authenticity, according to rules.

However, this “Houthi PC Small Group” can be classified as the first official blunder. By not using the SCIF system, merely for the sake of speedy dissemination, it has proved a disaster that the establishment can’t gloss over. President Trump saying it is not a “serious” glitch and top officials who were part of the blunder trying to downplay the sensitivity of the information and the risks of this kind of dissemination, are just trying to weather the political storm. But this is a disaster that has raised questions about security, intelligence gathering, efficacy, governance and capability of the Trump administration. Questions that will need much more than statements and glib talk to answer.

(The writer is a former Special Secretary, Cabinet Secretariat. He is a national security intelligence specialist and author of “Intelligence Over Centuries”). (Views are personal) (Syndicate: The Billion Press)