CIA director denies air strike chat leak was major mistake

Newshour

BBC

News, Daily News

4.4 • 984 Ratings

🗓️ 25 March 2025

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As President Donald Trump plays down the Signal leak, describing it as a “glitch”, a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing grilled officials to try to find out just how damaging this was to US national security.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe both denied that there was classified information in the chat.

Also on the programme: more details on the Darfur market attack in Sudan described as a “massacre”; and why bitcoin mines are heading to Africa.

(Photo: CIA Director John Ratcliffe testifies before a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on worldwide threats. Credit: Reuters)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to NewsHour live from the BBC World Service in London.
0:08.5	I'm Rebecca Kesbby.
0:10.2	There's been a furious reaction among Democrats in the United States
0:14.3	as more details of the intelligence leak involving senior figures in the Trump administration
0:19.6	have emerged today.
0:21.2	The director of the CIA and the head of the US national intelligence have been taking
0:26.0	tough questions at a Senate committee today.
0:29.1	But President Trump has been playing down the significance of the leak, though he did say
0:33.2	an investigation would be carried out, but he's been responding to questions from journalists
0:38.1	in the past hour or so.
0:39.7	We always want to use the best technology. This was the best technology for the moment.
0:44.8	But again, it wasn't classified, so they probably viewed it as being something that
0:49.1	wasn't that important. And it obviously, with the attack being, I mean, I don't know if it's been read out
0:55.6	to you yet, but that attack was a tremendous success for the US.
1:00.0	Well, just to recap briefly, a journalist from the Atlantic magazine, Jeffrey Goldberg,
1:06.1	was accidentally added to a chat group on the commercial messaging app signal, on which the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Advisor and the Vice President, among others, discussed military action against the Houthi movement in Yemen.
1:20.1	Today, Geoffrey Goldberg told the US public broadcaster PBS and explained he was so shocked to be included in that chat that he
1:29.7	initially assumed it was a hoax. You know, it really became a very bizarre situation on
1:35.7	Saturday the 15th of March when I was shared on a text in this group from somebody
1:44.1	purporting to be Pete Heggeseth, the Secretary of Defense.
1:47.8	This text contained operational military information, including the time that bombs were supposed to start dropping on Yemen.
1:55.6	And this was two hours before that time.
	...

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