WASHINGTON: The White House on Monday confirmed that a journalist was included in a group chat in which US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, Vice President JD Vance and other top officials discussed upcoming strikes against Yemen´s Huthi rebels.
President Donald Trump announced the strikes on March 15, but in a shocking security breach, The Atlantic magazine´s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg wrote that he had hours of advance notice via the group chat on Signal.
“The message thread that was reported appears to be authentic, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain,” National Security Council spokesman Brian Hughes said.
Trump meanwhile told journalists that “I don´t know anything about it. You´re telling me about it for the first time,” also saying that “the attack was very effective” in any case. The leak could have been highly damaging if Goldberg had publicized details of the plan in advance, but he did not do so even after the fact.
He did however write that Hegseth sent information on the strikes, including on “targets, weapons the US would be deploying, and attack sequencing,” to the group chat. “According to the lengthy Hegseth text, the first detonations in Yemen would be felt two hours hence, at 1:45 pm eastern time,” Goldberg wrote -- a timeline that was borne out on the ground in Yemen.
