Controversy continues to build over the use of the Signal social app by top national security officials from President Donald Trump’s administration to discuss an attack against Houthi rebels in Yemen. Questions remain over whether the president’s Cabinet selections and top appointees, made up of less-experienced Washington outsiders, led to such ill-advised communication.
The inadvertent inclusion of Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg by national security adviser Michael Waltz led to the full publication of the communications chain, exposing messages between Cabinet members over sensitive national defense procedures that included incongruous language and emojis. Now, former members of the defense and intelligence communities wonder who’s in charge of policy and operations — and if they’re qualified for the responsibilities they carry.
Sean O’Keefe was secretary of the Navy during former President George H.W. Bush’s administration before becoming NASA administrator under former President George W. Bush. Before those presidential appointments, he served on the Deputies Committee of the National Security Council, the Senate Committee on Appropriations staff, and as staff director of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. Now the distinguished senior adviser at the Syracuse University Center for Strategic and International Studies, O’Keefe insists such open discussion of national security affairs is unique in U.S. history. Still, his greatest concern is how the discussion took place through publicly open channels.
“In my experience from the standpoint of having served as an appointee in the Pentagon and as secretary of the Navy, using such an unsecured channel to coordinate plans is unheard of and would never have occurred in previous administrations,” O’Keefe said. “I’m certain there’s a lot more information involved here than anybody has acknowledged.”
O’Keefe said he finds it difficult to believe that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe did not know about the Signal leak, as they claimed.
“How that could not have dawned on this collection of senior people that [Signal] was the wrong mechanism to use to coordinate activities or to discuss the details of something like this attack is beyond me,” O’Keefe added. “I can think of absolutely no precedent for something like this — sharing every detail of an attack of this nature.”
Recalling his time on the National Security Council Deputies Committee, O’Keefe insisted that any such operational plans and intelligence would have been discussed exclusively in the White House Situation Room, while nothing said in council would have been written down or transmitted.
“Even if we had a text communication via extraordinary circumstances, it would be done by highly controlled and classified virtual networks,” O’Keefe said.
The national defense veteran became more incredulous when considering the nature of the published messages.
“I’ve seen nothing in my experience of the nature of what they’ve said here,” O’Keefe explained. “The terminology, the very casual discussions, the emojis — it just speaks to a very sophomoric approach to this situation. As if somehow they’re playing some damn video game as opposed to conducting the real-life business of the nation. People out in the world are going to get killed when they’re discussing these circumstances, and you’d expect them to handle it with more sobriety and severity.”
O’Keefe noted that the amateurish messages were in poor enough taste, even without considering that the Signal app has an unacceptable level of security and encryption for Defense Department purposes.
“The fact that this was done on an unclassified and very social media network of limited closure is just incredible,” O’Keefe said. “I know that would not have gone on with the military operational folk I served with originally. If anyone had even considered that then, I would be among the first to say we really needed to take this onto a different platform to discuss such a level of detailed intelligence.”
O’Keefe said he can’t see any way the unprotected communique could prove a sort of double bluff or a deliberate leak to mislead the Houthis or their Iranian commanders, as some Trump defenders claim.
“I can’t think of what that motivation would be, and, once again, it’s unheard of in defense operations,” O’Keefe said. “Based on the timeline and the evidence, what they discussed with the attack did occur. The results were oddly celebrated as if somehow this was some kind of a bet that should merit a level of exuberance.”
Rebecca Lonergan worked with the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles for 16 years before becoming a professor at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law. As a federal prosecutor, she handled national security cases in counterterrorism and espionage prosecutions. While never in the military, Lonergan handled classified intelligence during her career. She said she finds the way administration officials mishandled information about counterterrorism military operations in Yemen “shocking and horrifying” on multiple levels.
“Mishandling any classified intelligence is bad, but putting information about combat operations on an unsecured channel which could very easily be intercepted by foreign adversaries, and even the targets themselves, could put our troops at risk,” Lonergan said. “I have a lot of friends in the military who are horrified at what was done.
Lonergan insisted that anyone with a genuine track record in intelligence or defense who leads either military or civilian counterterrorism operations would realize the grave risks in airing any type of covert or battlefield intelligence.
“If they had that serious background, they’d know the dangers involved and would never have done what they so carelessly did,” she added.
Barry R. Posen is the Ford International Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While he shares the concerns of O’Keefe and Lonergan that such high-level officials would take such risks, he said he is also concerned about how this event could affect confidence in the chain of command.
“Senior officers and commanders down the chain are surely disappointed in the looseness of the civilian principal actors in this event,” Posen said. “But Pete Hegseth is the secretary of defense and has the authority to see anything he wants. The officers know that. I imagine that the negative effects of this will be subtle — an informal military reticence.”
Posen said he believes such tension can be overcome if the civilians demonstrate this was a one-off in the shakeout phase of Trump’s first 100 days. If such sloppiness proves a pattern, he worries about the smoothness of coordination and cooperation between the military personnel and their civilian bosses in the future.
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As for O’Keefe, when asked if those nonmilitary overseers will learn from this scandal, he said he wonders first if they’ll truly understand the depth of their mistakes.
“Their actions simply don’t speak to an appreciation or awareness of the severity of precisely what was going on with something this life and death serious,” O’Keefe said. “I can’t even begin to guess what they were thinking. I’ve just never encountered anything like this in my career and have never been involved in anything even remotely this poorly managed. How we dealt with military actions and intelligence and how they’ve handled the same speak to entirely separate experiences and operating conditions. It was simply never like this.”
John Scott Lewinski, MFA, is a writer based in Milwaukee.
