Jakarta –
US officials are scrambling to identify the source of leaks of military and intelligence documents that have recently appeared online. The highly classified documents contain details on everything from Ukraine’s air defense to Israel’s Mossad spy agency.
Given the breadth of topics covered in the document, US officials suspect that the documents were leaked by Americans themselves and not allies. The document contains not only the war in Ukraine, but also in China, the Middle East and Africa.
“Our focus right now is about leaks from the US, because a lot of those documents belong only to the US,” Michael Mulroy, a former senior Pentagon official, told Reuters in an interview.
US officials said the investigation was still in its early stages and those involved in the investigation had not ruled out the possibility that pro-Russian elements were behind the leaks. The Russian embassies in Washington and the Kremlin have so far not responded.
The document leak is considered one of the most serious security breaches since 2013, when more than 700,000 documents, videos and diplomatic cables appeared on the WikiLeaks website at the time.
Information on Ukrainian air defense
Reuters has examined more than 50 documents labeled “Confidential” and “Top Confidential” which first appeared last month on social media sites Discord and 4Chan. Although several documents were uploaded several weeks ago, their existence was reported for the first time on Friday (07/04) by the New York Times.
Reuters has not independently verified the authenticity of the documents. However, some documents contain estimates of the number of war casualties from Ukraine which appear to have been altered to minimize Russian losses. It is also not clear why at least one document was marked not secret but contained highly classified information. Meanwhile, some documents are marked “NOFORN”, which means they cannot be given to foreign nationals.
Two US officials told Reuters on Sunday they did not rule out that the document may have been fabricated to mislead investigators about its origin or to disseminate false information that could harm US security interests.
In addition, one of the documents dated February 23, marked “Secret”, outlines in detail how Ukraine’s S-300 air defense systems will be depleted on May 2 at the current level of use. This kind of information could be of great use to Russian troops.
Information about the Mossad
Another document marked “Top Secret” and a CIA intel update from March 1, said Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad, encouraged protests against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plans to tighten controls on the Supreme Court.
The document says that the US learned about this through intelligence signals, suggesting that the US has been spying on one of its most important allies in the Middle East.
In a statement on Sunday, Netanyahu’s office dismissed the statement as “a lie and without any basis.”
There are also other documents that provide details about internal discussions among senior South Korean officials about US pressure on Seoul to help supply arms to Ukraine, as well as about Seoul’s policy of not doing so.
What did the Pentagon say?
The Pentagon has not commented on the contents of any specific documents, including those regarding surveillance of allies.
Two US officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity said only that while there were concerns about leaks at the Pentagon and intelligence agencies, the documents only show snapshots from a month ago, not a more recent assessment.
The two officials said that military and intelligence agencies were currently looking into their own processes regarding how widely intelligence information was shared internally over the years.
Officials are currently exploring what motivations a US official or group of officials might have in leaking such sensitive information, one of the officials who spoke to Reuters said.
The official said investigators saw four or five theories ranging from an “angry employee” to an insider threat actively seeking to undermine US national security interests.
gtp/ha (Reuters)
(it/it)
