US Officials: Hegseth Exposed Israeli Intelligence Asset in Signal Chat

This story becomes curiouser and curiouser .  It’s not enough that twenty of the Trump administration’s most senior national security and intelligence officials revealed top-secret military operations on Signal.

Yesterday, we learned that while they were exposing the US order of battle, they also took time out to savage our former European allies, calling them freeloaders, among other insults.  This drove another stake through the heart of the US-European alliance.

We’re now entering the third iteration of scandal.  The Wall Street Journal reports that two “US officials” have confirmed that one of the most quoted sections of the Signal chat regarding a US attack on a senior Houthi military figure, derived from an Israeli intelligence asset in Yemen.  Though the defense secretary didn’t reveal the identity of the source, WSJ did.

Thanks to the new leak, we know that Israel provided key intelligence to enable the attack.  That information was conveyed, presumably by the Mossad, to the Americans.  There’s a double scandal here: one, that Hegseth used Israeli intelligence and potentially endangered its Yemeni source. Second, that these US officials have linked Israel to the Houthi attack and described precisely what intelligence Israel provided.  This is something all such agencies guard as the crown jewels of spycraft.  And the Israelis are none too happy about it.

What was the motivation of these US officials in revealing the Israeli role?  The inner “brain trust” met in the past 24 hours devising ways to offload Waltz, who will fall on his sword for the sake of MAGA. That’s the meaning of the leak, which was probably proferred by chief of staff, Susie Wiles, who participated in the meeting.  It seems increasingly clear that Hegseth has gotten an (undeserved) reprieve and Waltz is a dead man walking. Trump will always sacrifice someone else in order to protect himself from responsibility.

Regarding the Houthis raid, US intelligence knew and deliberately targeted a residential building in which the Houthi official was located.  Hegseth boasted that the building had been destroyed. Undoubtedly, this would have killed civilians. The Trump administration had absolutely no compunctions in doing so.  This is a war crime.

Of course, Israel has long dispensed with any moral constraints on killing civilians in such strikes.  The US has also killed millions of civilians in warfare in the decades since WWII.  But this is the first time that any Trump defense official has publicly admitted (even if implicitly) that it killed civilians.

The entire premise of the US attack is questionable.  The Houthi haven’t targeted Gulf shipping in since November 2024.  They have never posed a serious threat to US naval vessels.  A tiny percentage of shipments intended for the US pass through the Red Sea.  So what’s the purpose?

In the group chat, JD Vance argued that the administration had no responsibility to Europe to guard the waterway though which much of its trade flowed.  It wasn’t our fight. But Hegseth countered that we needed to teach the Houthis a lesson in order to “re-establish deterrence.”  Why?  What did we need to deter?  Would such an attack have had any impact on conditions in the Gulf?  Would it have restored shipping through the Strait?  No.  A single US attack would not reassure maritime companies to return their vessels.

Perhaps Trump wanted a cheap victory to distract from the furor developing over his domestic polices (tariffs, immigration raids and disappearances, etc.). Using a small Middle Eastern country as a punching bag is a tried and true tactic of bullies like Trump and Netanyahu. There’s nothing like the flash of missiles and video of US warplanes hurtling off aircraft carriers in the Middle East to stir the patriotic hearts of Americans.  So in that sense, media coverage of the attack was positive.  But since then, everything else has gone to shit.  And these fools have no one but themselves to blame.