LEILA FADEL, HOST:
The White House is confirming a stunning security breach. A journalist was included, apparently by accident, in a group text where top U.S. officials were making war plans on the messaging app Signal. Here's how The Atlantic's editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, explained it on All Things Considered yesterday.
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JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I'm included in a group chat called Houthi PC small group. PC in White House parlance stands for Principals Committee. And I look at the group. It's 18 people or so, and it includes what I take to be the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the national security adviser, the vice president, CIA director and so on.
FADEL: Goldberg says he was skeptical at first but quickly learned it was, in fact, a space where administration officials were trading detailed texts about weapons and tactics for strikes on Houthi rebels in Yemen. To discuss how extraordinary a breach like this is, we're joined by Ned Price. He was a State Department spokesperson under President Joe Biden and spent more than a decade at the CIA before that. Good morning, and welcome back to the program.
NED PRICE: Good morning, Leila.
FADEL: So, Ned, you spent more than a decade at the CIA, then time at the State Department, where most recently you were deputy U.N. ambassador and sat on the Principals Committee, which makes policy decisions on U.S. national security matters. So with that hat on, what was your reaction to hearing top Cabinet officials, including the vice president, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, were discussing war plans on a private messaging app?
PRICE: You know, Leila, look. I've been dismayed on a number of policy fronts by this administration - that is to say what I think are the dangerous, reckless decisions that they're making, again, on a policy basis. But it's fair to say that never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that they'd be this reckless and careless with our national security in terms of how they were going about doing that. In other words, the technical aspect of how they get to these decisions. Over the course of the past 24 hours or so, I've been talking to former colleagues who also sat in on these Principal Committee meetings, and it's fair to say, Leila, that heads are exploding because, as Jeffrey Goldberg just alluded to, the Principals Committee - it's really the apex of the national security decision-making process. It's where the toughest, most consequential decisions are made. And to see it done in this manner, it is nothing that I think any of us ever could have expected.
FADEL: How is this information supposed to be shared between government officials who might be traveling and unable to meet in person?
PRICE: Well, Leila, almost by definition, the principals - the meetings of the Principals Committee are held in the White House Situation Room, perhaps the most secure venue within the U.S. government. And those who are able to be there in person are there in person, literally sitting around the table. And - but when you're a, you know, national security principal - the secretary of state, the secretary of defense - often you're called to travel overseas, naturally. Those who can't be there in person are able to join by what's called SVTC, or secure video teleconference. This is a top-secret network that beams them into the White House Situation Room. And whenever a Cabinet member of the - within the national security realm travels overseas, he or she has a team that goes before them. They will set up a secure tent. They will set up the camera so that these individuals are able to join on a secure basis, and not just a secure basis, but a top-secret, encrypted basis.
Even if that fails, Leila, there are fallbacks, and those fallbacks are to join by voice, to join by a top secret - basically, a top-secret phone that while you can't see the principal on camera, you can at least hear their voice. Applications like Signal, unclassified cellphones - that, on the other hand, is not something that would certainly be appropriate for these discussions.
FADEL: Now, there have been concerns around breaches in the past - for example, Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state under Barack Obama, communicating on a private email server. How unprecedented is this breach?
PRICE: Well, to my mind, there is no precedent. And, you know, you raised the Hillary Clinton case. I think the difference there is that - and there are many of them. I wouldn't even compare the two in some respects. But the key difference is that the secretary - Secretary Clinton and her team knew that they were communicating on an unclassified system, and they went to lengths to ensure that - to the best of their ability at the time, to ensure that what they were saying was on an unclassified basis.
To my mind, this is very, very different because these individuals, while they knew they were on Signal, a commercial software, on what I suspect were their personal cellphones, not even their government-issued cellphones, they were - they knew they were on this unclassified system, and yet it seems that they were discussing some of the most sensitive elements within the national security realm, information that is so dangerous because it went beyond Yemen. The way Jeffrey Goldberg describes it, he alludes to what we refer to as sources and methods - that is to say the tactics that the intelligence community and the Defense Department would use against any set of challenges we have, whether it's the Houthis, whether it's a state actor or a non-state actor.
FADEL: Former State Department spokesman Ned Price, thank you for speaking with us.
PRICE: Thank you.
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