No guarantee that anything Woodward writes is actually the truth - versus what the power players he interviews want to promote as the truth…so someone needs to get to the bottom of this.
Articles imply that he was relying on intelligence that said certain players in China were nervous about a US attack. Is he equipped to decide if this intelligence is accurate? Is he authorized to essentially blow the source of the intelligence (intercepts, humans, whatever) by telling the Chinese we know what they are thinking? How did he know this was not a ruse by China?
And, most fundamentally, does a military officer have the right to go outside the chain of command to give comfort to an adversary? He had not received any unlawful orders, apparently.
This is a very troubling situation.