WASHINGTON — A new batch of classified documents that appear to detail U.S. national security secrets from Ukraine to the Middle East to China surfaced on social media on Friday, prompting the Pentagon to report. move and further destabilize the situation seems to have disoriented the Biden administration to its defense.
U.S. officials say the scale of the leak — which analysts say could contain more than 100 documents — coupled with the sensitivity of the documents themselves, could be damaging. A senior intelligence official called the leak a “Five Eyes nightmare”, referring to the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, so-called Five Eyes countries sharing intelligence widely.
The latest documents were found on Twitter and other websites on Friday, a day after senior Biden administration officials said they were investigating possible leaks of classified war plans. types of Ukraine, including an assessment of Ukraine’s air defense capabilities. One slide, dated February 23, is labeled “Secret/NoForn,” meaning it cannot be shared abroad.
Mick Mulroy, a former senior Pentagon official, said the leak of classified documents showed “a serious security breach” that could thwart Ukraine’s military planning. “Since many of these are images of documents, it appears that it was a deliberate leak done by someone who wanted to harm Ukraine, the United States, and Ukraine efforts,” he said. United States and NATO.
One analyst described what has emerged so far as “the tip of the iceberg”.
Early on Friday, senior national security officials dealt with initial leakwas first reported by The New York Times, said a new worry had arisen: Was that information the only intelligence leaked?
By Friday afternoon, they had an answer. Even as officials at the Pentagon and national security agencies are investigating the source of the documents appearing on Twitter and Telegram, another has surfaced on 4chan, a side message board. , incognito. The document 4chan is a map intended to show the state of war in the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, where a fierce battle has raged for months.
But the leaked documents appear to go beyond top secret documents about Ukraine’s war plans. Security analysts who have reviewed documents circulating on social media say the growing trove of documents also includes sensitive summaries on China, military battlefields in the Indian Ocean- Pacific, Middle East and Terrorism.
The Pentagon said in a statement on Thursday that the Department of Defense was looking into the matter. But privately, officials in several national security agencies acknowledge both the rush to find the source of the leak and the possibility of what one official said could be a small amount of classified information being posted. loads regularly on the web.
Documents about the Ukrainian army appear in the form of photographs of projected diagrams of weapons supply, army and battalion strength, and other plans. Pentagon officials acknowledged that they were legitimate Defense Department documents, but the copies appeared to have been altered in parts from the original format. The revised versions, for example, overstated US estimates of war deaths in Ukraine and underestimated the number of Russian soldiers killed.
On Friday, Ukrainian officials and pro-war Russian bloggers suggested that the leak was part of an effort by the other side to disinformation, to influence a possible spring offensive. out of Ukraine in order to regain territory in the east and south of the country.
A senior Ukrainian official said the leak appeared to be a Russian plot to discredit a counterattack. And Russian bloggers warn against trusting any information, which one blogger says could be the product of “Western intelligence to distract our orders”.
Behind closed doors, national security officials are trying to find the culprit. One official said the documents likely did not come from Ukrainian officials, as they did not have access to specific plans, which bear the hallmarks of the offices of the Pentagon’s General Staff. A second official said that determining how the documents were leaked would begin with determining which officials had access to them.
According to Aric Toler, an analyst at Bellingcat, the Dutch investigative website, the first batch of documents appeared to have been posted in early March on Discord, a social media chat platform popular with people. play videos.
In Ukraine, Lieutenant Colonel Yurii Bereza, a battalion commander of the Ukrainian National Guard whose forces have been fighting in the east of the country in recent months, denied information about the leak.
He noted that information warfare has become so fierce that “we can no longer determine what is true and what is a lie”.
“We are at that stage of the war when information warfare is sometimes more important than direct battles on the front lines,” Col. Bereza said.
One soldier in his unit, Maksym, is still unknown. “We have a lot of our own problems, and with this leak, I have no words,” he said angrily.
Outside experts say it is difficult to draw conclusions about who leaked the information and why.
Kyle Walter, head of research at Logically, a UK company that tracks misinformation, said many prominent voices on Russia’s Telegram channels are calling the original photo, which is clearly unedited. edited shows Russian and Ukrainian casualties to be an operation of “Western influence”.
“They think that the actual unedited photo which shows the high Russian loss numbers and the relatively low Ukrainian losses is an attempt to sow morale in Russia and other countries,” said Walter. Russian forces”.
Jonathan Teubner, executive director of FilterLabs AI, which tracks messages in Russia, said that while pro-Kremlin voices say the leak was a US or Ukrainian disinformation campaign, the analyst His main analysis suggested that it may have been a Russian operation to sow distrust between Washington and Kyiv.
Walter said the edited photo showing a lower Russian casualty count and a higher Ukraine casualty toll than reported was discussed more frequently on west-facing social media. Western rather than on Russian-focused platforms.
This is a frequent Russian disinformation tactic to alter stolen documents, including some allegedly leaked from the Ukrainian government, Walter said. But because the Ukrainian government has dismissed these documents as altered or out of context, they generally don’t attract much attention, he added.
“There are many examples of leaked documents being used in propaganda campaigns and especially in terms of disinformation,” said Walter. But what is going on with these American documents, he added, “is still unclear.”
Walter said the Ukraine war had more leaks than other conflicts, partly because of the role open source and declassified intelligence played in the war.
“There’s certainly been an increase, it’s happened more often, but that’s just an indication of the environment we’re in and not a strategy specific to the Ukraine war,” Walter said.
Natalya Yermak contribution report.
