Classified Stuff

While stationed in Europe, I drew an assignment to serve as a visiting officer to a French battalion of Infantry Marines in the coastal city of Vannes in Brittany. Not many American officers knew the French language, and even though my French was marginal, the command felt it would improve and be needed in case the balloon went up. That is, there was war on the central plains of Europe. After returning to garrison, I was asked to write a classified account of my observations while assigned to a French platoon. Our battalion S-2 officer knew what the word classified meant and complied with Army procedure in handling my report. Today, I don’t recall what I wrote, except to say the French were liberal in the use of corporal punishment by officers on enlisted personnel. I filed the report and hadn’t thought about it much since then.

The news this week is of the operational security breach when National Security Advisor Michael Waltz added national security reporter and editor in chief of The Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg to a chat about an ongoing attack in Yemen on the messaging application Signal. I had not heard of this app, which is an American open-source, encrypted messaging service for instant messaging, voice calls, and video calls. Signal has known vulnerabilities to infiltration by Russian and Chinese intelligence. Worse case scenario, bad actors were listening in on the chat in real time, in addition to an experienced national reporter present by apparent mistake. There are issues.

First, the president was not part of the chat and likely should have been. When people on the chat asked whether the attack should commence, whether the president authorized it, no one knew. The decision to make the strikes then appears to have been made by deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, according to Heather Cox Richardson. What was the president doing then, instead of being in this meeting? Watching television or doom scrolling his phone? The president said he didn’t know anything about it.

Content of the chat aside, why weren’t the participants using secure channels for this discussion? Even if the Situation Room at the White House is not a viable option, the government has secure channels for use in its place. Either the administration hopes to avoid scrutiny by using a commercial messaging app, or they are incompetent… maybe both.

I would much rather write about other things on this blog. The truth is I need to process what I’m hearing and writing about it helps. What we heard this week is important and we can’t look away. Plenty of other sources have better detail and analysis about the security breach. I’ll let the story run its course, which is expected to be a long one.