Congressional lawmakers demanded answers Tuesday as outrage grew over a major leak of highly classified government documents, with U.S. allies fuming about apparent American spying efforts and adversaries gloating over a deeply embarrassing scandal that has caught the Biden administration off guard.
Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat, called for an all-Senate classified briefing on the documents. A chorus of other lawmakers on Capitol Hill said the administration needs to act quickly to find the leak’s source and prepare for possible disclosure of even more damaging material.
The Pentagon and Justice Department have launched investigations into the leaked materials, which the administration has yet to authenticate, although Defense Department officials said the documents appear to be similar to those used for military leaders’ daily briefings.
Perhaps most worrying, the White House and other government agencies can’t say whether additional leaks are on the horizon, nor have they offered any clues about how long the investigations might take.
“We’d like to get answers as quickly as we can so we can find out, you know, where this breach occurred. But I don’t know. And I think it would be foolish for anybody to try to guess how long that’s going to take,” White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters Tuesday.
The documents, most of which are several months old, contained sensitive information and intelligence on various topics, including the disposition of Ukrainian forces, a possible Egyptian weapons deal with Russia and a possible hack of a Canadian pipeline by Russian-based cyberintelligence agents.
Tuesday brought even more troubling disclosures. The Associated Press reported that one document shows Russian intelligence officials — in conversations evidently captured by U.S. intelligence — bragging that the Kremlin is partnering with the United Arab Emirates to work against the U.S. and Britain.
The UAE called those reports “categorically false.”
The revelations underscored the deep damage that has already been done as a result of the leak, one of the most significant disclosures of classified information in years.
Indeed, the administration has been in full-blown damage control mode. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said he has been convening daily meetings of top military officials as part of an “urgent” governmentwide response to find the perpetrators and stop further leaks.
“We take this very seriously,” Mr. Austin said Tuesday at a press conference with Secretary of State Antony Blinken alongside their Philippine counterparts at the State Department.
“We will continue to work with our outstanding allies and partners,” Mr. Austin said. “And nothing will ever stop us from keeping America secure.”
Yet numerous U.S. relationships are becoming strained. Officials would not comment on a Washington Post report, citing one of the leaked documents, that Egyptian officials had discussed secretly supplying Russia with as many as 40,000 rockets. Such a step, which would clearly help Russia’s war in Ukraine, would be a major blow to U.S. efforts to galvanize global opposition to Moscow’s invasion.
The Kremlin and a leading Egyptian state-linked newspaper denied the allegations.
Another document appears to show that U.S. intelligence agencies eavesdropped on high-level South Korean internal discussions over weapons sales to the U.S. and Seoul’s fears that those weapons would end up in Ukraine. That document could drive a wedge between Washington and Seoul, an irreplaceable American ally in the Pacific.
One paper contained apparent U.S. intelligence suggesting that Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service, had encouraged its staff and Israeli citizens to join domestic protests against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial reform plan. Mr. Netanyahu categorically rejected that claim in a rare public statement on Israel’s intelligence activities.
Of most immediate concern could be documents related to Ukraine and its war effort. The documents reportedly include pessimistic assessments of Ukraine’s chances for success in its upcoming spring offensive and more tangible information, such as the Ukrainian military’s “burn rate” of U.S.-supplied artillery and other equipment.
Mr. Blinken would not comment on any specific issues in the documents but said he spoke with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba earlier Tuesday.
“In speaking to him, I reaffirmed our enduring support for Ukraine and for its efforts to defend its territorial integrity, its sovereignty, its independence,” Mr. Blinken said.
Disinformation?
Critical questions about the authenticity of the documents remain unanswered, fueling speculation that the leak might be connected to foreign adversaries or an elaborate disinformation campaign. Photos of the sensitive documents first appeared quietly on the gamer social messaging app Discord early last month but were not given wide publicity until late last week.
Intelligence officials were reportedly studying the leaked documents to narrow down who would have had access to them and how they ended up on the site.
No date had been set for Mr. Schumer’s all-Senate briefing, but members of Congress urged the Pentagon and other arms of the federal government to act immediately to protect sensitive information.
“Protecting classified information is critical to our national security, and the [Defense Department] and intelligence community must work quickly to prevent any spillage and identify the source of any leak,” Rep. Michael Turner, Ohio Republican, and Rep. James Himes, Connecticut Democrat, said in a joint statement late Monday.
“We have requested additional information from the Defense Department and [intelligence community] and expect the committee to be briefed as the investigation proceeds,” said Mr. Turner and Mr. Himes, chairman and ranking member, respectively, on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
Bellingcat.com, the British-based internet sleuthing site, posted a lengthy forensic analysis of the origins of the secret documents on the gamer chat app Discord. It found that a user had posted some of the documents in question on March 4 and that those documents might have been based on a previous post on one of the site’s chatrooms as early as January. Bellingcat said app users have a history of putting sensitive or secret documents and intelligence on the site during debates about the accuracy of weaponry and tactics in video war simulation games.
Bellingcat investigator Aric Toler reported that on March 4, “after a brief spat with another person on the server about Minecraft Maps and the war in Ukraine, one of the Discord users replied ‘here, have some leaked documents’ — attaching 10 documents about Ukraine, some of which bore the ‘Top Secret’ markings.”
That poster referred to an earlier publication of the leaked documents on a now-deleted Discord site known as “Thug Shaker Central.” Bellingcat investigators wrote that they were “unable to independently verify all of the information shared by these users, including the aforementioned January document or if the other uploader described as the source of the leak was indeed the original source.”
Unreliable partner
U.S. adversaries seized on the leak to portray Washington as an unreliable partner that routinely spies on its allies.
“While knowing that their security interests are highly tied to that of the U.S., allies are coming to realize that the relationship with Washington is more of a domination and subordination [relationship],” Yang Xiyu, a senior research fellow at the China Institute of International Studies, told China’s state-run Global Times newspaper on Tuesday. “To satisfy its own selfish needs, the U.S. is threatening the security of its allies through spying on their intelligence by any means necessary.”
Russia’s state-run Tass news agency played up reports that the disclosures could deal a blow to the Ukrainian military by disclosing details about Kyiv’s force strength ahead of its widely anticipated spring offensive.
Such narratives from China and Russia aren’t surprising, but Western intelligence officials suggested that the documents — and the media’s fixation on them — could aid disinformation efforts from U.S. adversaries.
“The widely reported leak of alleged classified U.S. information has demonstrated a serious level of inaccuracy,” the British Ministry of Defense said Tuesday in a Twitter post. “Readers should be cautious about taking at face value allegations that have the potential to spread disinformation.”
Pentagon officials said Monday that some documents appear to have been altered. One document lists the number of estimated Russian military deaths so far in Ukraine at just 16,000. Western officials put the number of Russian fatalities at nearly 200,000.
The document dump on the Discord site contained more than 100 images of government papers with classification markings posted to social media sites, including Twitter.
Some leaked documents had the nation’s highest classification marking.
Many of the documents have since been deleted, though open-source intelligence sleuths have been able to download more than 60 of the papers.
The documents seem to be photographs of printed materials.
* Article From: The Washington Times