I’m skeptical. It’s all to easy for some unattributable source to claim a transmission tricked the Special Forces.
The radio transmissions are encrypted to begin with and it is hard to believe there are not validating procedures in place on top of the encryption to prevent things like this from happening.
Hell, I was in the AF and even we didn’t just take any radio transmission as fact and act on them without proper confirmations.
You are completely correct, but that's not exactly what the article is hinting at. Let me clarify.
The Taliban commander fed information into our intelligence collection architecture. It doesn't say how, but that point doesn't matter. We have eyes and ears, real and electronic, all over the place. The Taliban know we watch them, and they know certain actions will get our attention. Senior leader Taliban meetings being a big one, obviously.
What this means is that the Taliban is becoming very sophisticated at figuring out how to leave bait that our HUMINT, SIGINT and other intel vacuums side will take up and accept as valid. If they feed information to HUMINT sources we trust, and wires we listen to, they can lure us wherever they want.