The Signal Leak’s Fallout Is Serious

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, March 27, 2025

 

Over the 48 hours since The Atlantic exposed the Signal chat snafu, the administration’s defenders have deployed a variety of conflicting excuses designed to mitigate the scandal’s potential for political damage. It is simultaneously a “hoax” that didn’t happen, the result of subterfuge by nefarious elements in media, and/or a nothingburger about which no one outside the Beltway could or should care.

 

The only polish that the administration might have applied to this humiliation that would have made sense was largely left unused by either Donald Trump or his subordinates. That approach would have led administration officials to concede that the Signal chat and its exposure were all mistakes but that the strikes themselves were a great success, and the American people shouldn’t get bogged down in ancillary details. According to the Wall Street Journal’s reporting, though, the leak has far broader implications that could undermine the campaign against not just the Houthis but all of Iran’s regional proxies.

 

“Israel provided sensitive intelligence from a human source in Yemen on a key Houthi military operative targeted in an attack described by national security adviser Mike Waltz in an unclassified Signal chat with senior Trump administration officials, two U.S. officials said,” the Journal reported.

 

Israel’s role in supplying information that helped track the militant highlights the sensitivity of some disclosures in the texts and raises questions about the Trump administration’s contention that no classified information was shared on the Signal chat, a publicly available nongovernmental app.

 

“The first target — their top missile guy — we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it is now collapsed,” Waltz wrote, without disclosing the source of the information.

 

Waltz didn’t describe the sources of the intelligence but said in another text that the U.S. has “multiple positive ID.” The U.S. also received intelligence about the targets struck in the attack from surveillance drones flying over Yemen, defense officials said.

 

In sum, the text thread burns intelligence provided to the U.S. by our Israeli counterparts, which hostile counterintelligence analysts can trace back to its sources to limit or prevent future disclosures. In the worst case, the leak exposes the human sources on the ground inside Yemen who provided information that was eventually captured by Israeli and U.S. intelligence networks — an exposure that will imperil those sources and preclude future cooperation from other would-be informants. Even more troubling is the potential that this leak will convince America’s allies to throttle U.S. access to their intelligence products in the legitimate fear that such candor would imperil their own sources, methods, and assets.

 

It is still best practice to avoid the temptation to catastrophize. The conversation that this leak exposed provided the public with some reassurance that a pretty conventional inter-agency process still governs U.S. military action abroad, and it shows that the elements in this administration who would dismantle America’s alliance structure aren’t in the driver’s seat — at least for now. But the fallout from this leak continues to settle over the geopolitical landscape, and it is slowly poisoning America’s relations with its allies and undermining U.S. security in measurable ways.