What we know about the Pentagon leaks

Samantha Hawley: Hi, I’m Sam Hawley, coming to you from Gadigal Land. This is ABC News Daily. It’s one of the biggest dumps of top secret US defence documents since WikiLeaks, and we still don’t know who’s behind the Pentagon leak. A trove of highly classified material has once again ended up on the internet, embarrassing the US and angering some of its closest allies. Today, The Washington Post’s national security correspondent Missy Ryan on why the world’s secrets don’t seem to be safe in American hands.

Lloyd Austin, US Defense Secretary: Let me just say a few words about the story that I know many of you are tracking. I was first briefed on the reports of unauthorised disclosure of sensitive and classified material on the morning of April 6th.

Samantha Hawley: Missy, this is a really intriguing story. We haven’t seen a breach like this since WikiLeaks.

Missy Ryan: Yeah, this does seem to be the biggest breach or dumping of American classified documents, classified material in more than a decade. It does remind us of the disclosures from Edward Snowden, which was a couple of years after the WikiLeaks disclosures.

Lloyd Austin, US Defense Secretary: We take this very seriously and we will continue to investigate and turn over every rock until we find the source of this and the extent of it.

Samantha Hawley: Of course, it’s not as big a leak as we saw with WikiLeaks. That was something like 700,000 documents and videos, diplomatic cables. We’re talking about something like 100 documents here. But first, just tell me, when did the Pentagon first realise that these US intelligence documents had found their way into the wrong hands? When did we first get a sense of what was going on?

Missy Ryan: Well, the Pentagon has said that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was first notified of this on Thursday, last Thursday, which was the same day that The New York Times broke this story. But, you know, it does raise the question of why the Pentagon didn’t know about this leak earlier, because these documents, dozens of them were circulating on the kind of less scrutinised corners of the internet for weeks beforehand, as far as we can tell. It took the media breaking this story for it to come to the attention of US policymakers.

Reporter: Secretary Austin, you just said that you first learned about the leaked documents on the 6th of April. They’ve been online for months. Why didn’t US intelligence, the rest of US government, see those leaked documents online for all those months? Is that an intelligence failure?

Lloyd Austin, US Defense Secretary: The documents that that we are aware of are dated the 28th of February, 1st of March. I don’t know if there are other documents that are that have been online before. These are things that we will find find out as we continue to.

Samantha Hawley: As you say, they were out there for a while. We’ve learned that they were sitting on social media platforms like Discord, which is popular with gamers from early March. And then it spread further with these documents landing on Twitter, 4chan and Telegram. So how do we know, Missy, or do we know for sure now that this is a leak rather than a hack?

Missy Ryan: We don’t know much for sure about these documents. It does not have the hallmarks of a hack just because the way that the documents are presented, they appear to have been printed and folded, which suggests that somebody who had legitimate access may have tried to get them out of a facility versus, you know, an exclusively digital means of collection. Some of them at least, seem to have been prepared for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other senior policymakers. And they also have markings that show that they shouldn’t have been at least distributed to foreign governments, foreign individuals. So that makes you think that it it makes it less likely that it would have been a foreign allied government that somehow, you know, had this leak happen. So all of that suggests that it was, you know, American person or American who had access legitimately to this, that sort of the working hypothesis of a lot of us in in the media who are tracking this closely. But again, nobody really knows.

Samantha Hawley: It looks like from some reports that someone has hastily taken photographs of pieces of paper sitting on top of what appears to be a hunting magazine. It sounds like something you’d see in a movie. You know, someone racing around with top secret documents and taking photos of them.

Missy Ryan: Yeah, I mean, it does. And there’s been a lot of sort of amateur detective analysis going on on Twitter about like, you know, what can we deduce from these little snippets of of things that you see on the desk of this person or the margins of these documents. But what we know is that those packets of daily updates go to thousands of people within the US government, people who have the TS/SCI clearances, which is, you know, a lot of people. And so that makes it that much harder to track across agencies, across facilities. And they’re going to be taking a hard look at that.

Lloyd Austin, US Defense Secretary: And I’ve directed an urgent cross-department effort and we’ve referred the matter to the Department of Justice, which has opened a criminal investigation.

Reporter: Many of the documents are based on information gathered by some of the most secret wings of the US intelligence community, including the National Reconnaissance Office, the NRO, the National …

Reporter: Materials, some marked top secret, revealed details from the war in Ukraine and offer a snapshot of the battlefield situation in the beginning of March.

Reporter: One document from February warning Ukraine’s air defence systems may collapse without deliveries of more missiles from the country’s partners.

Samantha Hawley: I can see that some of these documents appear to be barely 40 days old, so they’re really, really sensitive. So just tell me a bit more about these documents, because a lot of them relate to the war in Ukraine, don’t they?

Missy Ryan: A lot of them relate to the war in Ukraine and tactical updates, tactical information about what the strengths and weaknesses are for the Ukrainian military versus the Russian military. I actually was in Ukraine at the time of most of this reporting. It does track, you know, some of the things that people were thinking about at that time, you know, the different levels of casualties and, you know, the all of the challenges that Ukraine is going to be facing as it tries to to fight Russia in the coming months.

Samantha Hawley: But also, I guess it does give us this better understanding of just how involved the US Defence Force is right now in Ukraine, and that could be actually damaging to the war effort, couldn’t it?

Missy Ryan: The government in Kyiv has been downplaying the significance of this kind of saying, you know, this information about the, for example, ammunition shortages is already very public. The Ukrainian government has been talking about it for a long time and that’s why they’re asking so urgently for more. I don’t know that it changes the overall fundamentals. They can make tactical changes that could sort of compensate for some of the stuff that was divulged tactically. But, you know. It has to make them uncomfortable about sharing things with the United States. And they don’t have any choice, you know, because the United States is by far the largest backer for Ukraine and the largest provider of military assistance.

Samantha Hawley: And it’s not only Ukraine, is it, that’s being caught up in this. It’s also damaging for other countries, including Egypt, because information leaked about it says it was preparing to ship rockets to Russia.

Reporter: It’s also showed that Egypt, a close US ally, secretly planned to produce 40,000 rockets for Russia.

Samantha Hawley: And that’s despite it being one of the US’s closest allies in the Middle East. So that’s not good. Yeah, well, what.

Missy Ryan: The document that we had access to said was that the Egyptian president, Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, had ordered his subordinates to produce 40,000, up to 40,000 rockets to be secretly shipped to Russia. Subsequent to that, the US government has told us that they have no evidence that the plan has been executed and the Egyptian government seems to be trying to throw cold water on the story. And then you can draw your own conclusions about the reasons why it wouldn’t have been executed. Is that because they were talked off it by the United States or someone else? Or is it because they decided against it?

Reporter: The leak of the documents has also revealed how the United States spied on its own allies like Israel, like South Korea, like Ukraine.

Samantha Hawley: We also learn about how other nations are dealing with the war in Ukraine. And some of that’s really sensitive, particularly for South Korea, because we learn it was considering sending weapons to Ukraine at America’s urging, which would violate a long standing practice of never sending weapons to a war zone. This is really sensitive.

Missy Ryan: Yeah, it is. And we’ve seen some of the most loudest protestations come from Seoul about the the fact of these leaks.

Kim Byung-Joo, South Korean Lawmaker: We strongly regret that the top US intelligence agency had been illegally spying on allies like our country. We strongly demand a thorough investigation and urge that similar incidents do not occur.

Missy Ryan: And that’s a whole other element that is interesting to think about, which is the United States is in sort of damage control mode right now because they have to reassure allies who are either embarrassed by the revelations or could face their own political problems. But also, even though everybody knows that most countries with the capability to spy on each other, even with allies, America’s friends don’t like it when this stuff is dumped out in public. You know, it kind of reinforces concerns about how the United States is using its vast spine capability. It certainly makes the United States look kind of irresponsible if they’re going to allow things like this to happen.

Samantha Hawley: So, Missy, we know more than 100 documents have been leaked. I guess the question really is why? What is the motive here? What’s the point of it?

Missy Ryan: Well, first of all, we don’t know what else is out there that people haven’t been able to find yet. You know, the stuff that may have been posted and then taken down. And in terms of motive, you know, I don’t think anybody knows yet because we don’t know who did it. I would assume that in the coming weeks, as people try to zero in on the identity of this person or persons, we’ll know more. But, you know, I think all we can do right now is speculate and kind of try to put these tiny pieces of information together.

Samantha Hawley: The Federal Bureau of Investigation is trying to determine the source of this. And this is a massive breach and it’s a serious crime, of course, in the US. But this is all just really a bit embarrassing, isn’t it, for the US? Because it seems like, I suppose to allies that if the US has got their secrets, they’re just not safe. Yeah, I mean.

Missy Ryan: It’s not even countries that are necessarily sharing information with the United States and then getting out. It’s also that the United States is fine and then, you know, that is getting out. So, you know, I just don’t think that most of the countries that work in close partnership with the US have, you know, it’s not obvious to me what they can do about that. You know, I feel like these alliances probably will weather this. But, you know, certainly it’s kind of the cost of doing business with the United States at this point and maybe just the cost in this, you know, digitised world.

Samantha Hawley: Missy Ryan is the national security correspondent with The Washington Post. The leak also included a suggestion that the leaders of Israel’s intelligence service, Mossad, had encouraged citizens to participate in anti-government protests in March. The Israeli government has since firmly rejected that. This episode was produced by Veronica Apap, Flint Duxfield, Sam Dunn and Chris Dengate, who also did the mix. Our supervising producer is Stephen Smiley. I’m Sam Hawley. Thanks for listening.