President Trump has dismissed Gen. Timothy Haugh, head of NSA and CYBERCOM, along with NSA Deputy Director Wendy Noble, amid a sweeping shakeup of key national security positions.
Haugh succeeded Gen. Paul Nakasone last year as “dual hat” director of the National Security Agency (NSA) and U.S. Cyber Command (CYBERCOM), as well as the Central Security Service (CSS). He was fired by President Donald Trump on April 3, as was Wendy Noble, the Deputy Director and senior civilian leader of NSA. Reports suggest that these firings came in the wake of a meeting between Trump and Laura Loomer, a well-known influencer in conservative circles. In a post on X, Loomer wrote that Haugh and Noble “have been disloyal to President Trump,” and “that is why they have been fired.” (Whether related to the firings or not, media reports have said that Elon Musk met with Gen. Timothy Haugh on March 12.)
The firing of Haugh and Noble comes on the heels of Trump firing at least three of his National Security Council staffers, which also followed Trump’s April 3 meeting with Loomer. As Zero Hedge had reported on Thursday, April 3, Loomer had publicly singled out Trump’s Deputy National Security Adviser Alex Wong, who, she says, added a journalist from The Atlantic to a DoD Signal chat on behalf of his boss, National Security Adviser Michael Waltz. It is not presently clear whether the shakeup at NSA-CYBERCOM-CSS is related to the Signal affair, but it should be noted that Haugh participated in the March 25 Senate hearing on the matter, where he said that the chatter on Signal by the Trump officials would be the type of signals intelligence that Haugh’s agencies would be seeking from foreign adversaries. However, Haugh failed to mention that the encrypted communication over Signal had been cleared for government use by the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) in a memo published a month before Trump was sworn in. CISA’s memo would have undoubtedly been seen, and perhaps collaborated on, by NSA.
