The revelation that top U.S. national security officials used Signal to discuss classified battle plans against the Houthis emerged because Atlantic Magazine journalist Jeffrey Goldberg was somehow on their Signal chat. This remarkable security breach is shocking but not completely unprecedented. The truth is that as long as national security information is written down somewhere, anywhere, it has the potential to find its way into places that it should not.
Perhaps one of the most legendary military leaks in American history was of General Robert E. Lee’s Special Order 191, which detailed his battle plans during the Confederate invasion of Maryland in 1863. Two Union soldiers found the plans wrapped around a cigar box, from where the documents made their way to Union General George McClellan. Upon seeing them, the notoriously indecisive McLellan said, “Now I know what to do!” He intercepted Lee’s forces, leading to the bloody but important Union victory at Antietam.
In both of these cases, the leaks were inadvertent, but it’s more common that there is at least some intentionality in modern era leaks. Washington Post Editor Ben Bradlee revealed an incident in which John F. Kennedy left a briefcase with government papers with Post publisher Philip Graham. The documents pertained to the U.S. government’s approach to dealing with French leader Charles de Gaulle. When questioned about the wisdom of leaving documents that he knew to be classified with a newspaper publisher, Kennedy said of Graham, “He has been good to me and to this country, and I want to help him out.”
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Of course, Graham’s paper would subsequently be involved in some much more significant leaks. One of them was the Pentagon Papers during the Richard Nixon administration. In this case, RAND Corporation official and Vietnam War skeptic Daniel Ellsberg leaked documents about the U.S. national security establishment’s thinking on Vietnam during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.
The documents did not reveal contemporary U.S. war strategy, but they showed skepticism by U.S. officials about America’s increasing involvement in the war. The Nixon administration went to court to stop the New York Times from running the documents, but Ellsberg also leaked them to the Washington Post, which did run the information. Ellsberg was brought to trial for his actions, but the charges were eventually dismissed.
The Nixon administration suffered more damaging leaks from Deep Throat, who gave Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein inside information about the Watergate burglary cover up. The scandal led to Nixon’s resignation, but it was only a few years later, when Woodward and Bernstein published “All the President’s Men,” that the American public learned of the existence of the mysterious source Deep Throat. This led to decades of speculation about Deep Throat’s identity, speculation that only ended in 2005 when former FBI deputy director Mark Felt revealed that he had been the secret source.
Felt’s betrayal stemmed from anger at being passed over for the job of FBI Director. Felt died three years after revealing his secret but suffered no consequences for his actions.
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Following Felt’s example, other leakers have revealed inside White House information to advance either themselves or their policy preferences. In 1979, former Jimmy Carter speech writer James Fallows wrote an article in the Atlantic dishing on the White House for which he had until recently worked, revealing Carter to be a notorious micromanager.
In late 1981, Ronald Reagan budget Director David Stockman revealed his misgivings about Reagan‘s budgetary policies to The Atlantic’s William Greider. Stockman kept his job at the White House only after White House chief of staff James A. Baker told him that he was “going to have lunch with the president. The menu is humble pie. You’re going to eat every last $&@$ spoonful of it.”
In the Clinton administration, George Stephanopoulos was blamed for speaking too freely to Woodward, leading to a portrait of an administration in chaos in Woodward’s book “The Agenda.” These were all to some degree “ego leaks,” in which staffers provide revelations demonstrating their proximity to power.
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Sometimes ego leaks also have national security implications. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage leaked to Washington Post columnist Robert Novak that Valerie Plame was a CIA agent during an internal battle about the George W. Bush administration’s attempts to prove that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Armitage shamefully kept that fact quiet during an internal investigation regarding the source of the leak, causing Vice President Dick Cheney aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby to be convicted in the incident. Libby’s sentence was commuted by Bush and he was later pardoned by Donald Trump.
In 2010, General Stanley McChrystal unwisely derided Barack Obama’s Vice President Joe Biden in front of a Rolling Stone reporter, leading to Obama demanding the general’s resignation.
These were low tech leaks, while the Goldberg chat group was a technology-enabled leak. This fact puts it in the same category as other 21st-century leaks from Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, who were able to gather and leak large caches of classified information using modern information systems. Manning was sentenced to prison but had her sentence commuted after seven years by Obama. Snowden escaped to Russia. While the Goldberg texts reveal the incredible ability of national security officials to have live conversations responding to events in real time, they also reveal the danger that those conversations could get leaked through either carelessness, as in this case, or malice, as happened with Snowden or Manning.
The Trump administration is now investigating how the Goldberg error happened, as well it should. It seems unlikely that anyone will be punished too severely for this unintentional breach but expect the administration to tighten protocols for setting up future chats.
Whatever new protocols come into place won’t fully prevent future national security leaks, though. As long as government remains a source of information that the rest of us don’t have, there is always going to be great interest in finding out what that information is.
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