The Department of Justice has launched an investigation into the suspected leaks of US intelligence documents on social media in recent weeks.
The probe comes as more records leaked on Friday, ranging from US support for Ukraine to information regarding major US allies such as Israel, further exacerbating the damage from the already concerning leaks. The Pentagon announced on Thursday that it was looking into the subject after social media posts of allegedly classified information about the Ukrainian war surfaced.
“These appear authentic,” a US official said of the leaked documents.
US officials said they are investigating the leaks and working towards a more formal evaluation of what is in the documents and how they were leaked. So far, they look to be genuine, and there is no reason to question that the documents are what they appear to be. Officials in the United States feel that their public publication would constitute a significant breach.
The documents discovered by open-source intelligence analysts on Friday appear to have been put online in recent weeks. These appear to contain sensitive information ranging from the mercenary Wagner Group’s operations in Africa and Israel’s paths to delivering deadly aid to Ukraine, to intelligence regarding the UAE’s ties to Moscow and South Korean concerns about transferring ammunition to the US for use in Ukraine.
AWN was unable to independently confirm that the documents had not been altered. These are, however, comparable to a batch of classified documents about Ukraine that have been circulating online in recent weeks, and which US officials verified to AWN on Friday morning were legitimate.
Friday’s findings, like many before them, were images of printed-out, crumpled paperwork. All were marked with classified marks, some of which were top secret – the highest level of classification. These also appear to have been created between the middle of February and the beginning of March.
It is unclear who is behind the leaks and where they came from.
Authorities were alarmed.
The leaks have alarmed Pentagon officials, notably those on the Defense Department’s Joint Staff, which is made up of the DoD’s most senior uniformed leadership and is responsible for advising the president. Many of the documents bore markings indicating they were created by the Joint Staff’s intelligence branch, known as J2, and looked to be briefing documents.
Earlier on Friday, US sources confirmed that identical information regarding Ukraine were included in a broader daily intelligence briefing deck generated by the Pentagon for top leadership about the war.
US authorities stated that a leak inquiry would focus on probable perpetrators within the Pentagon. Nevertheless, given the enormous number of people across the government who have access to these kind of information, a person familiar with US intelligence said a probe would most likely not be restricted to the Pentagon. Several of the records also had indications indicating that they were shared with members of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, which includes the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.
Additional indications indicate that information from other agencies, such as the State Department’s intelligence arm, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency, has been included.
Several of the documents, however, bear labels suggesting that they were obtained through human intelligence and are forbidden to be shared with foreign nationals, including the closest US friends.
Some of the documents make use of CIA classified information. “We are aware of the social media posts and are investigating the claims,” an agency spokeswoman told AWN on Friday.
‘No one seemed to notice.’
According to screenshots of the posts reviewed by AWN, images of some of the documents, which include estimates of Russian casualties and a list of Western weaponry systems accessible to Ukraine, were posted to the social media site Discord in early March.
“This sh*t was sitting in a Minecraft Discord server for a month and no one noticed,” Aric Toler, an investigative reporter at Bellingcat who tracked the sequence of the leaked documents, told AWN. Minecraft is a well-known video game.
It wasn’t until this week that the hacked documents gained traction after someone posted a piece of them to 4chan, a prominent extremist web site, and then a Russian speaker shared an edited version of one of the documents on Telegram, according to Toler.
American officials suspect that paper was tampered with in order to inflate the projected number of Ukrainians dead in the conflict.
The Pentagon confirmed on Thursday that it was aware of the social media posts and was looking into them.
On Discord on Friday, there was a lot of conjecture and fear, with some members questioning if they could get in jail for re-posting the documents now that the US government is looking into it. On March 1, a user who posted images of the documents appeared to have deactivated his Twitter and Discord accounts.
“The availability of raw and edited – doctored – versions of some files online makes me suspicious that this is a professional Russian intelligence operation,” Thomas Rid, a specialist on state-backed information operations, told AWN.
Historically, if an intelligence agency has access to classified material from an opponent and decides to fabricate some of the material, Rid, a professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, does not make both versions of those papers public.
“It merely makes it easier to detect the facts, defeating the goal,” Rid explained.
But, there is concern that the leaked documents may have real-world consequences.
“If true, the leak of these documents can do significant damage to the Ukrainian counteroffensive because this information effectively provides Russia with Ukrainian order of battle — extensive information on capabilities of brigades that would be involved in the upcoming counteroffensive,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, executive chairman of Silverado Policy Accelerator and a Russia analyst.