The Russians and Chinese already may be crawling through the Hegseth family devices and on their way to compromise U.S. military missions.
It’s not unreasonable to assume the risk scenarios painted by experts are spot on.
Goldsmith, a threat intelligence expert, said there were many scenarios wherein a foreign government could gain access to those chats, without the need to directly compromise Hegseth’s devices.
“Pete Hegseth is texting his wife and his wife is posting on Instagram, clicks a link, and gets malware on her phone,” said Goldsmith, describing a hypothetical scenario. “Then the Chinese or the Iranians or the Russians just happen to be like, ‘Oh, shit, we’ve got Mrs Hegseth, [without] even targeting her.’”
Oh shit.
Plenzler, who was a public affairs officer in the Iraq war under the former secretary of defense Gen James Mattis, a senior figure in Trump’s first administration, said he and his boss understood the importance of respecting the secrecy of communications in the field.
“If any officer or enlisted member had passed classified information over an unsecured or unauthorized [device], we would have been immediately removed [them] from our position, investigated, most likely prosecuted,” he said. “For an officer, it’s a career killer.”
Hegseth has got to go.
Let’s put this in 1981 terms, because the Farewell Dossier still matters. When the CIA discovered the KGB were systematically stealing Western technology, a trojan horse was injected to be be stolen. The sloppy Soviets grabbed the compromised technology and deployed it into their critical pipeline system, resulting in a massive explosion. Today’s Russian intelligence officers propping up the rotten Putin dictatorship—many trained directly by KGB veterans who swore revenge for this humiliation—don’t simply hack devices; they methodically map entire human networks. They identify the “soft target” family members, establish surveillance patterns, and deploy targeted exploits that leave no digital fingerprint.
The Hegseth acts of willful negligence and vulnerability being advertised to the world are intelligence targeting 101. Any true professional recognizes that sharing classified communications with family members violates the most fundamental OPSEC principle: “need to know.”
When the KGB legend Markus “man without a face” Wolf ran East German agents during the Cold War, he understood family connections as “the golden thread” to unravel even the most disciplined operatives. From the Cambridge Five to Aldrich Ames, history has proven repeatedly that personal relationships are the vulnerability that skilled adversaries exploit first.
A single compromised access point (like a Hegseth clan phone) could will be leveraged for catastrophic results.