According to Der Spiegel, German intelligence have just arrested two suspected Russia spies who had US defence secretary Pete Hegseth's private phone number in their mobiles.
A spokesperson for Der Spiegel confirmed it did not publish such a story.
A claim that the United States defence secretary’s phone number was found on the personal mobiles of two arrested Russian spies misleadingly cites a German news outlet as its source.
Posts shared on Threads and X (formerly Twitter) are captioned: “Interesting. German Intelligence have just arrested two suspected Russia spies, they had US Sec Defence Hegseth’s private phone number in their mobiles. (Der Speigel) [sic].”
But Der Spiegel, a German news website, confirmed to Full Fact it has not published any article which supports this claim.
A spokesperson told us: “After reviewing the tweet you shared, I can confirm that there is no article from DER SPIEGEL that supports the claims mentioned. It appears that someone may have misleadingly used DER SPIEGEL as a source.”
Der Spiegel did report in March that Mr Hegseth’s phone number, as well as the contact details of some security advisers, were freely available on the internet.
It also previously reported two alleged spies, described as German-Russian dual nationals, were arrested in April 2024 in Germany after being suspected of planning to sabotage German military aid for Ukraine. But Mr Hegseth was not in office at this time.
Full Fact could find no verifiable source for the claim, whether in English or German media, that Russian spies had been arrested in Germany and found to be in possession of Mr Hegseth’s phone number.
The posts include a screenshot of a Fox News broadcast of United States defence secretary Pete Hegseth, with the banner saying: “Secretary Hegseth on new group chat allegations.”
This is taken from an interview with Mr Hegseth on the channel on 22 April.
It comes after a widely reported security breach in March this year, where a journalist was added to a Signal platform messaging group that included senior members of the US government—including Mr Hegseth—and in which the journalist claimed classified military plans were shared.
The New York Times reported this month that Mr Hegseth had also shared information about air strikes against Yemen in a second Signal group chat with members of his family and his personal lawyer. The White House told the newspaper that no classified information was shared. Mr Hegseth told Fox News in the interview featured in the screenshot “no one’s texting war plans”.
Before sharing information like this that you see on social media, it’s important to consider whether it comes from a verifiable and reputable source.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because Der Spiegel says it has not published any such report and has been cited as the source misleadingly.
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