On April 26, 2025, a claim (archived) circulated online that German intelligence services arrested two alleged Russian spies who had U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's private number stored in their cellphones.
For example, one X post (archived) featuring the rumor, which had amassed more than 1.7 million views at the time of this writing, read:
German intelligence has just arrested two suspected Russian spies, who were found with US Secretary of Defense Hegseth's private phone number stored in their phones.
The suspects, identified as German-Russian nationals, are accused of scouting targets for potential attacks — including U.S. military facilities in Germany — according to a statement released Thursday by the Federal Public Prosecutor General in Karlsruhe.
(X user @YourAnonCentral)
Some versions (archived) of the claim attributed the reporting to the German newspaper Der Spiegel. The claim also appeared on Facebook, TikTok (archived) and Reddit (archived), and Snopes readers emailed us to ask whether the rumor was true.
However, there was no proof that German intelligence services had carried out an arrest that involved finding Hegseth's private number in the phone of anyone believed to be Russian spies. A spokesperson from the Office of the Federal Public Prosecutor General of Germany said: "The Federal Public Prosecutor's office has not made arrests in this regard and did not issue a statement." A spokesperson from Der Spiegel's reader service said: "There is no article in Der SPIEGEL reporting on this topic." Therefore, we have rated this claim as false.
Social media posts don't hold up to scrutiny
Several popular social media posts featuring the rumor included sources or quotes that supposedly backed up the claim's authenticity.
For example, one iteration said the Office of the Federal Public Prosecutor General of Germany released information about the arrests on April 24, 2025. However, the office did not publish any releases on that date. As noted above, a spokesperson from the office said it had not made the arrest described in the claim or issued a statement about the alleged case.
Another popular version of the claim attributed reporting to Der Spiegel. However, there was no proof of this reporting. The outlet did publish one article (archived) on April 25, 2025, about Hegseth reportedly using a publicly available cellphone number to discuss U.S. airstrikes; however, nowhere in that article did it mention that German intelligence services had arrested two Russian spies who had his number in their phones. The only mention of Russians in the article read: "In Hegseth's case, this means that Chinese, Russians, or other intelligence agencies may have been able to read the sensitive communications about the planned attacks."
That X post expanded on the claim with quotes attributed to "German Interior Minister N. Faeser" (archived) and "the Russian Embassy" (archived).
A Google search for these quotes revealed that they were authentic but taken out of context. Nancy Faeser, the German minister of the interior, did call an arrest of two alleged German-Russian spies "a particularly serious case" — but in April 2024, well before Hegseth was made defense secretary, not in 2025.
Also in 2024, the Russian Embassy dismissed (archived) the arrests of the alleged German-Russian spies as "absurd" and gave the response cited in a popular 2025 claim.
German officials arrested the alleged spies from the 2024 case under suspicion of attempting to disrupt German aid to Ukraine. According to the German federal prosecutor's office, Dieter S., one of the arrested men, "gathered information on potential targets, including US military facilities." Dieter S. had also "declared his willingness to carry out explosive and arson attacks, primarily against military infrastructure and industrial sites in Germany," according to the prosecutor's office.
The German state filed espionage charges against Dieter S. and two others on Dec. 9, 2024.
Versions of the 2025 claim recounted details very similar to the 2024 case, claiming that the alleged spies were suspected of "scouting" locations including U.S. military bases for "attacks."
Info for Hegseth 'particularly easy' to obtain online
Though this particular claim was false, it was perhaps not outside the realm of possibility that regular people, including foreign actors, could gain access to Hegseth's cellphone number.
While Der Spiegel did not report on the alleged arrests of two Russian spies who had Hegseth's number in their cellphones, the paper did attempt to find Hegseth's information online and said it found the mission "particularly easy." According to a March 27, 2025, report (details in brackets ours):
DER SPIEGEL sent [a commercial] provider [on contact information] a link to Hegseth's LinkedIn profile and received a Gmail address and a mobile phone number in return, in addition to other information. A search of leaked user data revealed that the email address and, in some cases, even the password associated with it, could be found in over 20 publicly accessible leaks. Using publicly available information, it was possible to verify that the email address was used just a few days ago.
Der Spiegel also reportedly found information about U.S. National Security Adviser Mike Waltz and U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard but did not publish the information it uncovered. Snopes did not independently verify Der Spiegel's findings.
DeepL.com provided German to English translations for the 2024 arrest press release and the Russian embassy statement.