Jeffrey Goldberg:
I was invited a couple of weeks ago to connect with Michael Waltz, the national security adviser. That didn’t strike me as particularly strange, given my job and his job.
A little while later, I’m added to a group chat with the people you just named. That seemed strange. But I kind of just ignored it a little bit. And then it really became a very bizarre situation on Saturday the 15th of March, when I was shared on a text in this group from somebody purporting to be Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense.
And this text contained operational military information, including the time that bombs were supposed to start dropping on Yemen. And this was two hours before that time. So I simply waited and stared at my phone.
And, sure enough, the attack, the American attack on Yemen began to be felt at about 1:30 Eastern or so, 1:50 Eastern. And that’s when I realized that the chain was real. Until that point, I really had a deep suspicion that I was being spoofed or hoaxed or being led astray on a disinformation campaign, the rationale for which I can’t figure out.
But this all seemed so improbable that I simply assumed that it couldn’t be real.
