WASHINGTON — A new batch of classified documents that appear to detail American national security secrets from Ukraine to the Middle East to China surfaced on social media sites on Friday, alerting the Pentagon and adding to a situation the Biden government had apparently caught adding to the riot police.
The magnitude of the leak – analysts say more than 100 documents may have been preserved – combined with the sensitivity of the documents themselves could do enormous damage, US officials said. A senior intelligence official called the leak “a nightmare for the Five Eyes,” alluding to the United States, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, the so-called Five Eyes nations, which largely share information.
The latest documents were found on Twitter and other websites on Friday, a day after senior Biden administration officials said they were investigating a potential leak of secret Ukrainian war plans, including an alarming assessment of Ukraine’s faltering air defense capabilities. A slide from February 23 is marked “Secret/NoForn” which means it should not be shared abroad.
The Justice Department said it had launched an investigation into the leaks and is in contact with the Defense Department, but declined to comment further.
Mick Mulroy, a former senior Pentagon official, said the leak of the classified documents represented “a significant security breach” that could hamper Ukrainian military planning. “Since many of these were images of documents, it appears to be a deliberate leak by someone who wanted to damage the efforts of Ukraine, the US and NATO,” he said.
One analyst called what has emerged so far as the “tip of the iceberg.”
Senior national security officials dealt with early Friday the initial leakFirst reported by The New York Times, said a new concern had arisen: was this information the only information that was leaked?
By Friday afternoon, they had their answer. While Pentagon and national security officials were investigating the source of documents that appeared on Twitter and Telegram, another surfaced on 4chan, an anonymous fringe forum. The 4chan document is a map purporting to show the state of the war in the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, the scene of bitter months of fighting.
But the leaked documents appear to go well beyond top-secret material about Ukraine’s war plans. Security analysts who have reviewed the documents that have tumbled onto social media sites say the growing trove also includes sensitive briefing slides on China, the Indo-Pacific military theatre, the Middle East and terrorism.
The Pentagon said in a statement Thursday that the Department of Defense is reviewing the matter. On Friday, as disclosures expanded, department officials said they had nothing to add. But privately, officials from several national security agencies acknowledged both a rush to find the source of the leaks and a potential for what one official said could be a steady drip of classified information being released to websites.
The documents on Ukraine’s military appear as photographs of diagrams of expected arms deliveries, troop and battalion numbers, and other plans. Pentagon officials recognize that these are legitimate Department of Defense documents, but the copies appear to have been altered in certain portions from their original format. For example, the modified versions exaggerate American estimates of Ukrainian war casualties and underestimate estimates of Russian troops killed.
On Friday, Ukrainian officials and pro-war Russian bloggers hinted that the leak was part of a disinformation effort by the other side, timed to influence Ukraine’s possible spring offensive to retake territory in the east and south of the country.
A senior Ukrainian official said the leak appeared to be a Russian ploy to discredit a counteroffensive. And the Russian bloggers warned against trusting the information, which one blogger said could be the work of “Western intelligence agencies to mislead our command”.
Behind closed doors, angry national security officials tried to find the culprit. One official said it was likely the documents did not come from Ukrainian officials because they did not have access to the specific plans, which are stamped by the offices of the Pentagon’s Joint Staff. A second official said that determining how the documents were leaked would begin with determining which officers had access to them.
The first batch of documents appears to have been released in early March on Discord, a social media chat platform popular with video gamers, according to Aric Toler, an analyst at Bellingcat, the Dutch investigative site.
In Ukraine, Lt. Col. Yurii Bereza, a battalion commander of the Ukrainian National Guard whose forces have been fighting in the east of the country in recent months, shrugged off news of the leak.
He noted that information warfare has become so intense that “we can no longer tell where the truth is and where the lie is”.
“We are at a stage of the war where information warfare is sometimes even more important than direct physical clashes at the front lines,” Colonel Bereza said.
A soldier in his unit, Maksym, hadn’t heard the news. “We have many problems of our own and I have no words on this leak,” he said angrily.
Outside experts said it was difficult to draw any conclusions about who released the information and why.
Kyle Walter, head of research at Logically, a British company that tracks disinformation, said many prominent voices on Russian Telegram channels called the originally seemingly unaltered photo showing Russian and Ukrainian victims an operation with “Western influence”.
“They think the unedited photo showing high Russian casualty numbers and relatively low Ukrainian casualty numbers is an attempt to instill bad morale in Russia and the Russian armed forces,” Mr Walter said.
Jonathan Teubner, chief executive of FilterLabs AI, which tracks news feeds in Russia, said while pro-Kremlin voices said the leak was an American or Ukrainian disinformation campaign, his senior analyst thought it might be a Russian operation sowing distrust between them supposed Washington and Kiev.
The manipulated photo, which shows lower death tolls for Russia and higher ones for Ukraine than reported numbers, was discussed much more frequently on Western-leaning social media than on Russian-leaning platforms, Mr Walter said.
Altering stolen documents, including some allegedly leaked by the Ukrainian government, has been a common Russian disinformation tactic, Mr Walter said. But because the Ukrainian government has dismissed these documents as altered or taken out of context, they generally don’t gain much traction, he added.
“There are many examples of leaked documents being used in propaganda campaigns and particularly in relation to disinformation,” Mr Walter said. But what happens to these American documents, he added, “is still quite unclear at the moment.”
The Ukraine war, Mr. Walter said, has had more document leaks than other conflicts, in part because of the role open-source intelligence and declassified intelligence have played in the war.
“There’s definitely been an uptick, it’s happening more often, but that’s more indicative of the environment we’re in than the specific tactics of the Ukraine war,” Mr Walter said.
Natalia Yermak And Glenn Drossel contributed reporting.
