Tuesday, March 25, 2025

Part I

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A Signal National Security Controversy: An American Journalist Gets Accidentally Added to a Confidential Group Chat About Yemen Strike Plans

All right, so yesterday on The Briefing, we talked about a movie, indeed we talked about several movies, the worldview implications thereof. What if you came up with a movie in which you had a reporter say for a major national magazine and he was accidentally included in a very confidential address list when the United States Security Advisor to the President of the United States, the Secretary of Defense and others are communicating about American war plans. Let’s just say that you are a reporter and a complete set of war plans for a military operation is sent to you before it happens. Make for a great movie, right?

It also evidently makes for a reality because that is the big news in the United States right now and it’s shaking the national security and defense establishments, no doubt reverberations in the White House as well because indeed a set of war plans were accidentally texted to a major reporter. In this case, it was Jeffrey Goldberg who is editor-in-chief of The Atlantic. He was identified in the stream by initials as were some others. He was pretty quickly able to decode who the other people were. He wasn’t sure it was reality at all. And as a matter of fact, if you were put on that kind of list, you probably would assume it was some kind of a hoax and hoaxes of that kind have entrapped many reporters in the past.

So as Goldberg relates in a major article that he published at The Atlantic, he decided just to wait and see what happened, but as he says repeatedly, he didn’t believe that he was possibly actually receiving live war plans in advance of military action by the United States, accidentally texted to him as a member of the press. It was only when the operation was underway that he became convinced he actually had been accidentally included in a live military and military intelligence, national security privileged list, that was texted on Signal. And by the way, Signal, Goldberg identifies as, “An open source encrypted messaging service popular with journalists and others who seek more privacy than other text messaging services are capable of delivering,” and obviously it is not secure. It’s a publicly accessible open source platform. And evidently, that’s where some active war plans for the United States were being discussed, deliberated and disseminated.

The exchanges really are interesting, and of course, they weren’t meant to become public, but they did become public. In this case, Goldberg did not release the war plans. He didn’t write about the war plans. He instead basically acknowledged that the war plans were legitimate once it was discovered, and thus, he identified the situation to the Pentagon and beyond. But it is also clear that the text exchanges, as are covered in his article, really turned out to be very interesting, the Vice President or the person identified as JD Vance said to the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, “If you think we should do it, let’s go,” and then stated, “I just hate bailing Europe out again.” I’ll just say that sounds legit.

The Secretary of Defense responded, or at least the person identified in the text stream now known to be authentic as Pete Hegseth, said, “I fully share your loathing of European freeloading. It’s PATHETIC,” pathetic, by the way, capitalized. But speaking of Mike Waltz, the National Security Advisor, he comes back and says, “But Mike is correct. We’re the only ones on the planet on our side of the ledger who can do this. Nobody else even close. Question is timing. I feel like now is a good time. As any given POTUS,” that’s the President of the United States, “directive to reopen shipping lanes. I think we should go, but POTUS still retains 24 hours of decision space.” Don’t you like that? Military term, we can all use that, decision space. “When do we bomb the Houthis?” “Well, let’s just think about this as a matter of decision space.”

This turns out to be a highly personal form of exchange. The individual identified as the Vice President of the United States, JD Vance said, “I will say a prayer for victory,” and we’re then told two other users subsequently added prayer emoji. There you go, emojis, about an impending military attack. Goldberg writes, “According to the lengthy text, the first detonations in Yemen would be felt two hours,” hence from the time he writes this at 1:45 PM Eastern Time, “So I waited in my car at a supermarket parking lot. If this Signal chat was real, I reasoned Houthi rebels would soon be bombed. At about 1:55, I checked X,” that’s Twitter, “and searched Yemen. Explosions were then being heard across Sana’a, the capital city.” In other words, it was all legit. The war plans were real.

That was later acknowledged by the Pentagon saying at least they appeared to be real. Brian Hughes, spokesperson for the National Security Council, responded two hours later, we’re told, confirming the veracity of the communication. He said, “This appears to be an authentic message chain and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain. The thread is a demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials. The ongoing success of the Houthi operation demonstrates that there were no threats to troops or national security.”

Well, let me just state it doesn’t at this point appear that there was any real national security crisis in the situation because the person who received this inadvertently didn’t do anything with it, such as warn our enemies of an impending attack, much less release the actual structure of the war plan. The strikes against the Houthi rebels did indeed take place, and of course, they’re widely reported not only in the United States but around the world. The statement made by Brian Hughes, spokesman for the National Security Council, appears to affirm that the text thread was authentic, that the number of the reporter in this case was added inadvertently, but then he went on to editorialize that it’s a demonstration, “Of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials.”

Now I will also say that looking at that, well two things come to my mind. Number one, it does look thoughtful, and number two, it looks like fiction. And if anything, that just demonstrates the fact that truth is often stranger than fiction, and of course, truth has the advantage of being true. And so when you’re thinking about, for instance, if you were to create a plot for a novel or a short story or a movie in which you had something like this happen, of course, you would have it happen with more drama than it turns out here. You would also have to have a national security crisis with, of course, what happens when the leak takes place or you have an inadvertent addition of a civilian who doesn’t belong in this chain.

In this case, we should be thankful that it appears this civilian was quite responsible in not leaking the plans, or in any other way, giving aid and comfort to America’s enemies. But the second thing you have to think about is the fact that this really is, well, stupid. This is in a national security sense inexcusable, and yet at the same time, it’s immediately understandable how many of us hasn’t accidentally texted the wrong person. And I think a lot of people looking at this would say, “What in the world do you mean? You’ve got senior White House officials, the Secretary of Defense, the Vice President of the United States, military planners and all the rest on a text stream on Signal. I mean for crying out loud, you can sign up for it yourself.”

Now why would it be there? Well, let me just state, there is a reason that at least some Democrats are claiming and that is that, on Signal, you can arrange for your messages to disappear. And at least, some Democrats are saying, “Well, this is a way around the preservation of that kind of communication and just allowing it to disappear.” And by the way, there’s no embarrassment in this communication that the White House should want to disappear. But nonetheless, there are those who are saying that’s probably why they were on Signal.

The other reason is that it is encrypted and it is quite stable as a platform. And you know what this actually might demonstrate is that, when you are talking about the digital age right now, when even the most senior leaders in our military are operating on something like an iPhone or its equivalent, it turns out that it’s not so much that they downshifted to something we can use ourselves. It’s that what we can use ourselves has been upshifted to something just about as sophisticated as anything the United States military can come up with. In other words, if you have an iPhone, you can look at it and say, “You know, it could have been me who was accidentally included in these war plans,” but I’m thankful it wasn’t. I’m thankful in this case that it did fall into the hands of someone who, though a reporter, has reported about it after the events took place not before. And if anything, this is one of these events that can awaken the national security establishment to the fact that maybe they just ought not to be doing it this way because just maybe someone can be included inadvertently. I would think in the first place, if I’m on this tech stream, I’m not going to want to work on initials. I’m going to want to know who everybody is.

As I say, it’s also interesting to get inside the lingo here, in the terminology. I mentioned decision space. I like that one. How about high side? It turns out that, in this kind of communication, high side refers to the other side of the national security privacy encryption and let’s just say top secret wall. So high side means high security. The very fact it’s referenced in this means that they knew they really weren’t on a high-side communication in these texts, but high side, you can use that too. You can tell a kid when he asks a question you don’t want to answer, “Hey, I’m sorry, kid, that’s on the high side.”

Our Christian worldview reminds us that we live in a very dangerous world. We live in a world in which there are very real adversaries such as the Houthis rebels in Yemen. And we talked about them right after, I point out, after those strikes had taken place. And we live in a dangerous world, quite frankly, in which something as innocuous as a text stream can become a matter of life and death, national survival or national demise. And as you see this, it just affirms the fact, it underlines it, it highlights it, any one of us can make this mistake. With lower stakes, every one of us has made this mistake. But that’s where responsibility comes in. If you do bear this responsibility, you bear the responsibility not to make this mistake or at the very least to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

I can pretty much anticipate that there is going to be a more high-side communication with the people involved in this decision making, reminding them to keep these communications, well, to use their words, to keep their decision space comments on the high side.

Part II

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Trump Announces a New Fighter Jet: President Trump Announces F-47 Stealth Fighter – But Much About it Is Secret

Okay, there are a couple of other big headline stories that relate to this in an interesting way. For one thing, The New York Times reported on Sunday, “The 47th President unveils new US fighter, the F-47.” So there is going to be a new fighter in the American arsenal. It is going to be the most advanced, yet it is going to be known as the F-47. As John Ismay reports for The Times, “Since the late 1950s, most of America’s warplanes have been given names that indicate a threat like the F-4 Phantom and the A-6 Intruder or animals like the F-14 Tomcat, the F-15 Eagle and the F-16 Fighting Falcon.

But on Friday, “The country’s 47th president with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth by his side in the Oval Office announced that the US Air Force’s newest jet would be the F-47.” It was not announced what kind of animal or threatening moniker the plane is going to have. The 47th president of the United States simply said that, “47 is a beautiful number.” Okay, now enjoy this, “The Air Force Chief of Staff, General David W. Allvin was in the Oval Office and said later in a statement that the F-47 was a monumental leap forward in securing America’s air superiority for decades to come. He said the F-47 would be the most advanced, lethal and adaptable fighter ever developed, designed to outpace, outmaneuver and outmatch any adversary that dares to challenge our brave airmen. And the President by the way said that an experimental version of the new F-47 fighter has been operational for almost five years.”

See, we didn’t know that. It was rumored. There were supposed sightings or at least sightings of drawings. And this is the kind of project that in an open society can’t be kept fully secret. As Ismay remarks, “If the F-47 delivers on the president’s promises, it could well be the most advanced fighter aircraft in the world. Russia and China are working on their own sixth generation warplanes as are groups of European nations. The President said, ‘We know every other plane. I’ve seen every one of them and it’s not even close. This is a next level.’ He said, ‘You know, level five is good,’ meaning fifth generation fighters. The President went on to say, ‘You know, level five is good and level five refers to fifth generation aircraft in the United States.’ That means the F-22 and the F-35. But the president went on to say, ‘This is level six.’ The general, that is General Allvin, went on to say, ‘This would be the world’s first crewed, sixth generation fighter.'”

So looking at gen aircraft, you’re going up generation by generation and that means leaps in technology. So again, the fifth generation, which incorporated very high technology along with stealth, that included the Air Force fighters known as the F-22 and the F-35. By the way, the F-35 is now one of the most popular jets in the world bought by foreign armies that are at least permitted to do so by the United States. You’re talking about a very popular fighter and a very expensive plane. So you ask the question, how much is an F-47 going to cost? Well, they tell us they’re not going to tell us. What exactly are the specifics of the F-47? Again, they’re not going to tell us. Is it going to be a stealth fighter? Well, you can count on that. The President himself said that the plane would be “virtually unseeable.” Is it going to be powerful? What are the specifics? Well, the President simply pointed to the power of its engine saying that it would have, “unprecedented power. It’s got the most power of any jet of its kind ever made.”

Now those are general statements, “It’s going to be fast, faster. It’s going to be the fastest ever made. It’s going to be good. It’s going to be better than any fighter that’s ever been made before. How good? We’re not going to tell you. How much is it going to cost? We’re not going to tell you. What exact weapons will it carry?” Well, by now you know the answer. They’re not going to tell us. It is assumed that the new fighter will have the ability to carry both missiles and bombs. What exactly does it look like? Oh, this is very frustrating. They’re not going to tell us.

Now they will eventually tell us because we’re going to be able to see it. I recall back right after 9/11, I was traveling, and at that point, you had to travel by car. I was traveling to an event and I was driving through Missouri and I was doing so at just the time that an airstrike was originating from an Air Force base there in Missouri and I saw these planes in the air. They were the stealth bomber. I had never seen one before, but almost immediately you looked at these aircraft and recognized, “Wow, this is a game changer. This is completely different. They had to stack up as they say in the air, in order to get the entire group of planes ready to go. They refueled,” we now know, “at a base of Diego Garcia and they were able to go, bomb, refuel, come back.” It’s an amazing story, but that’s now more than two decades ago.

But my point is that Americans, by and large, really didn’t know what one of these planes looked like until they saw them because they’re flying in the air, and by the way, flying for deadly business. In a revealing statement, President Trump said he hoped the new aircraft would never have to be used in war, but he went on to say, “But you have to have it. And if it ever happens, they won’t know what,” I’ll just leave out a word here, “what hit them.” And that’s true. It’s responsible for an American president to say, “We hope we never have to use this in an act of war, but you have to have them and that’s because we live in a dangerous world.”

Once again, we come back to what is known in Christian theology as Augustinian realism. It’s the realism that says, “We live in a fallen world. We live in an evil world. We live in a world in which we have real enemies and it is responsible for a government, for a righteous government to get ready to defend itself against all threats.” And that means threats against the fact that you have others around the world trying to develop these sixth generation fighter bombers attack aircraft. And if the United States does not have it, you can be assured someone else will and that will change the national security situation in an unacceptable way for the United States.

One day, of course, we’ll know more about this plane, but at this point, the President of the United States and defense officials wanted to be very clear. There is a contract that has been awarded to Boeing, that in itself is an interesting story, and they’re not telling us much else about the plane and we’re going to have to wait unless I’ll just offer someone texts you the drawings.

Part III

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Spycraft, Espionage, and U.S. History: Government Releases JFK Files – What Do They Reveal?

But next, as we’re talking about national security and classified information, President Trump ordered the complete release unredacted of materials from the investigation of the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, President of the United States, on November the 22nd, 1963. And in the latest dump, which we are told, is comprehensive, at least we’re told that and unredacted, it’s about 64,000 pages.

Now, that’s been a matter of days ago. And when we talk about the assassination of President Kennedy, we are talking about one of the most hotly contested events in all of human history. That’s not an exaggeration. When you look at all the theories of exactly what happened, how many shooters from what angles, the conspiracies. Because immediately when you talk about something like the assassination of a president of the United States, who by the way was involved in the Cold War, and who by the way had been involved along with others in his administration, including his brother in a war on the mafia, by the way, very complicated relationship, but nonetheless, President Kennedy had enemies and there were those who would advance their causes by his elimination.

And so you can understand the level of conspiracy theories, of hypotheses of theories what happened and you would think that in the release of now 64,000 additional pages, we’re told this is the end of the set of documents, this is the bottom of the barrel. We’re told this is everything there is. President Trump himself said that the documents are unredacted. There’s a little asterisk at the end of that that says, “Except for some materials that are related to the ongoing security of the United States of America.” Let me just point out, that’s a very big asterisk. But when you wonder exactly what that might mean, well just look at reports of what has been found in the 64,000 pages. Not much in truth about the Kennedy assassination, but a good deal about American state security espionage and spy craft, both the successes of it and the clumsiness of it, the successes and the failures of it.

That’s one of the reasons why it turns out there was so much opposition to the release of this material. Organizations such as the CIA and other security agencies had a lot to lose by publishing information, including in some cases unredacted information about contacts and information gathering techniques. So you look at the situation and you say, “Well, this is really old. Who could be alive now? How dangerous could the release of this information be?” And there’s a point to be made there. This is probably not going to reveal anything that is a current national security interest or secret of the United States, but on the other hand, I often point out that spy craft and espionage turn out to be remarkably disclosive of basic worldview truths and concerns.

And when you’re talking about a dangerous world and you’re talking about gathering this kind of information, although technologically there’ve been some real advances, of course, and every day for that matter, technological advances and in gathering this kind of material processing, this kind of material recording, this kind of material. The fact is that on the human side of human intelligence, that part really hasn’t changed all that much as people inside spy craft tell us these days, it’s pretty much like the Romans versus the Greeks. Human nature hasn’t changed. Human behavior hasn’t changed all that much. The behavior of nations and empires hasn’t changed all that much. And yes, that comes back to a biblical truth, human nature, it hasn’t changed. This is testimony to that. 

Now there are some tantalizing things we know already mentioned in these 64,000 pages. One of those tantalizing things is the fact that one of the chief spies in the United States, John a McCone, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, had been in contact one way or another with not one but two popes in the Vatican. That could turn out to be a very interesting novel that no doubt would quickly become a movie that someone would of course mess up.

As I said, it was President Trump who made this decision and issued the executive order, but it did so on the authority of a law that was passed back in 1992 when George Herbert Walker Bush was President of the United States. What makes that most significant? Remember George Herbert Walker Bush, that is Bush 41, was himself a former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. That law back in 1992 is known as the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, again 1992. Why did that happen then? It was because of the Oliver Stone film, JFK, that prompted an awful lot of demands for the release of information. Back in 1992, they said, “All of it will be released in due time.” President Trump said, “2025 is due time.”

By the way, one historian who has had access to the information has already published a great deal about the Kennedy administration, says that, to him, one of the most interesting aspects of the documentation is the discovery that as The Times reported, “nearly half of the political officers in American embassies around the world were working for the CIA.” As he said, “That’s astonishing.” But while we’re thinking about these things related and in the headlines, again they just sometimes come in groups.

Part IV

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The Grounding at Heathrow: A Fire Shut Down One of the World’s Most Important Airports – What Happened? Is Russia Behind It?

Finally, I want to deal with the fact that there was a massive fire that knocked out power to one of the busiest airports in the world in recent days, that’s Heathrow Airport. In so many ways, the gateway in the Atlantic world between say North America and Europe and you’re talking about one of the busiest and most important aviation assets to the entire world, and in particular, to the Western world.

And shutting down Heathrow is one of those things that could come close to shutting down a society. It wasn’t 911 in scale, certainly not when you take into account the loss of human life, but in terms of a threat to the infrastructure, shutting down aviation is one quick way to shut down an economy, and for that matter, to create international chaos. So why am I talking about this related to the other things? Well, it is, because even though most of us would look at this fire breaking out any power unit, and the obvious question is, “How in the world could the authorities there in Britain have allowed their biggest aviation asset to be dependent upon one power station like this that could be knocked out?” The biggest question coming from Americans immediately from the American aviation community is, “Where in the world’s the redundancy that responsible parties would have here?”

Now at least Heathrow authorities were able to get the power back up and the airport back open, but that then leads me to a headline that just ran at The Telegraph, major newspaper there, conservative newspaper in Britain saying that MI5, that is one of the two major spy agencies there in Britain, is going to be “checking very carefully for Putin’s fingerprints on the Heathrow Fire.” And that is because, just remember, Vladimir Putin, Russia, its fingerprints have been all over some events that have taken place. Remember that the United States had to threaten Russia about putting cargo bombs on cargo aircraft, just a matter of the last year or so, and now you’re looking at at least informed people in the intelligence community in the UK pointing to Russia and saying, “We’re going to have to find out if Russian agents were behind this. If so, it is the warning of a kind of dry run that could happen.”

In an article that appeared in The Foreign Affairs Journal just this week, a NATO Deputy Assistant Secretary General warned members of the European Parliament that “incidents of sabotage were taking place across NATO countries.” That again from The Telegraph report. The Telegraph tells us, “At first glance, the Heathrow fire looks as if it could have Russian fingerprints all over it. It has marked similarities, for example, to the arson attack on the Ukrainian-linked warehouse in East London last year, for which two British men were arrested.” Well, it’s going to be interesting to see what we find out from the investigations there in Britain, but it’s also true that many of these things, though suspected, could go undetected. That is, of course, unless Vladimir Putin inadvertently added someone to his text stream. Then we might really know.