Photographs of U.S. intelligence information that appeared on social media platforms Telegram, 4Chan, Twitter, and Discord in recent weeks constitute the largest intelligence leak since the 2013 Wikileaks.
The New York Times reported on the leak on April 5th after a number of Russian Telegram channels shared photographs of U.S. intelligence files relating to the invasion of Ukraine.
The documents had been floating around on messaging channels popular with gamers for several weeks, or even months, before making it to Telegram and catching the attention of the media.
Mostly photographs of hard copies of briefings reports, some labelled “secret,” they are, according to the BBC, a cache of more than 100 documents containing information about both the war in Ukraine and several U.S. allies including Israel, the UK, and South Korea.
The Pentagon has acknowledged that they are likely real, but experts disagree on how damaging the leak is. On the one hand, they show the U.S. spying on its allies and contain information that those countries would also rather not reveal, creating an uncomfortable situation. On the other hand, the BBC, which has read several documents from the leak, points out that the leaked information on the Ukraine invasion is not particularly new, just more abundant. For example, it shows a “mud-frozen ground timeline” for a much-expected Ukrainian counteroffensive this spring but omits critical information such as the direction or thrust of the campaign.
Reuters reports that two U.S. officials who spoke to the news outlet on condition of anonymity said that while there was concern about the leak, the documents only showed a snapshot in time from more than a month ago, rather than more recent assessments.
Along this line is possibly the most alarming piece of information—an assessment that Ukraine’s air defences are being depleted more rapidly than publicly acknowledged. According to the New York Times, in a document labelled “secret,” Ukraine’s stocks of missiles for Soviet-era S-300 and Buk air defence systems, which account for almost 90% of Ukraine’s protection against Russian aircraft were projected to be fully depleted by May 3rd and mid-April, respectively.
But the document was issued on February 28th and based the assessment on consumption and replacement rates at the time. The situation may have changed. EU countries, for example, have stepped up their pledges of munitions and missiles to Ukraine.
Aric Toler, of Bellingcat, an investigative open-source intelligence group, traced the appearance of the documents to an argument about the Ukraine war on Discord. On March 4th, one of the users made his point with evidence. “Here, have some leaked documents,” he said, before posting 10 of the photographed documents. Toler says he has not yet been able to trace the source of the leak but has spoken with Discord users who claim similar documents had been passing through Discord channels for months.
Toler writes,
Bizarrely, the Discord channels in which the documents dated from March were posted focused on the Minecraft computer game and fandom for a Filipino YouTube celebrity. They then spread to other sites such as the imageboard 4Chan before appearing on Telegram, Twitter and then major media publishers around the world in recent days.
The FBI and the Pentagon have both launched investigations and have not ruled out any possibilities, though they believe the leak occurred on the U.S. side.
“The focus now is on this being a U.S. leak, as many of the documents were only in U.S. hands,” Michael Mulroy, a former senior Pentagon official, told Reuters in an interview.
