Asked if the leak was contained or whether more files were out there, White House spokesperson John Kirby said, “We don’t know. While 100 documents is a lot, it’s not near the scale of the leaks published by Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden. The documents are current - dated in late February or early March of this year - and cover a wide range of topics, beyond just Ukraine. The breadth and depth of the documents are also important. This may compromise the US’s ability, for example, to spy on Russia. “The documents appear - and I want to emphasize appear - to potentially reveal sources and methods,” says Glenn Gerstell, who served as general counsel of the National Security Agency from 2015 to 2020 and now works as an adviser to the consulting firm Beacon Global Strategies. What was most noteworthy is the scope of the information, which includes a variety of maps that show Ukrainian and Russian positions and in-depth intelligence reports. The number of individuals who might have access to such documents, these sources speculated, might number into the hundreds or even low thousands. The documents, according to several former officials I spoke with, seem to be photographed from a briefing book for a high-level US military leader and perhaps shared with allies. It really vexes me that it took over a month for them to gain popular notice.” What the leaks reveal “That’s a paradox to me,” Wilde continued, “that on one hand, these documents appear to show an intelligence community that excels at what it’s charged with doing, while being kind of catastrophically inept at another aspect of what it’s supposed to do. “The way we think about counterintelligence clearly needs to be more coherent.” “It’s just the latest indication that the intelligence bureaucracy is both remarkably adept and remarkably inept in this new misinformation environment,” he told me. Gavin Wilde, a Carnegie Endowment expert who previously worked in the White House and at the National Security Agency, says the documents expose the contradiction between the incredible intelligence-gathering capacity of US agencies and their apparent sloppiness in handling sensitive information. Congress has asked to be briefed, and allies are reportedly frustrated and confused. The Justice Department opened an investigation into the leaks, the Defense Department and several other government agencies are together assessing any impact on national security, and Pentagon leaders are angry and scrambling to undo the damage. They represent a major intelligence breach and offer insights into the US role in defending Ukraine from Russia’s invasion and other major geopolitical arenas.įor now, the documents’ ambiguous provenance, the somewhat surprising platform on which they were first posted, the signs that at least several were doctored, and the inability to independently verify them mean it’s difficult to draw sweeping conclusions.īut the US government is racing to try to contain the fallout. The classified files emerged as recently photographed folded documents that may have appeared as daily briefings for the military’s top leaders. The alleged leaker was filmed shooting a weapon after yelling racial and antisemitic slurs at the camera, and shared the intelligence with the tight-knit group of mostly young men. They spoke to two of the group’s members, and described the leaker as a “young, charismatic gun enthusiast” who said he worked on a military base. On Wednesday, the Washington Post reported they had found the original Discord group where the documents - and hundreds more yet unreported - had been posted. Now, more details are beginning to emerge about the documents’ provenance. And they show in some detail what the US has gleaned from spying on partners such as Israel, Egypt, and South Korea.Īnd most bizarrely, the documents surfaced more than a month earlier on anonymous, decentralized web forums dedicated to gaming, like a Discord channel devoted to Minecraft, and after that on 4chan. They indicate that the US has infiltrated Russian intelligence groups and has inside knowledge of hacking attempts on a Canadian pipeline. The files reveal closely held information about US operations, like a suggestion there are up to 100 NATO special operations officials in Ukraine, and details about casualty counts for both Russia and Ukraine. Last week, news organizations realized something quite remarkable: A trove of 100 secret US military and intelligence documents had been posted in the far-flung corners of the internet.
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