One senior U.S. official called the leak “a massive intelligence breach,” made worse because it lays out to Russia just how deep American intelligence operatives have managed to get into the Russian military apparatus. Officials within the U.S. government with security clearance often receive such documents through daily emails, one official said, and those emails might then be automatically forwarded to other people.
Another senior U.S. official said tracking down the original source of the leak could be difficult because hundreds, if not thousands, of military and other U.S. government officials have the security clearances needed to gain access to the documents. The official said that the Pentagon had instituted procedures in the past few days to “lock down” the distribution of highly sensitive briefing documents. The documents posted online were photographs of folded papers, some with images of a magazine behind them, information that may help investigators.
The documents show that nearly every Russian security service appears penetrated by the United States in some way. For example, one entry, marked top secret, discusses the Russian General Staff’s plans to counter the tanks NATO countries were providing to Ukraine, including creating different “fire zones” and beginning training of Russian soldiers on the vulnerabilities of different allied tanks.
Another entry talks about an information campaign being planned by the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence unit, in Africa trying to shape public opinion against the United States and “promote Russian foreign policy.”
While some of the intelligence briefs offer analysis and broad warnings of Russian plans, others are the kind of actionable information that Ukraine could use to defend itself. One entry talks about the Russian Defense Ministry formulating plans to conduct missile strikes on Ukraine’s forces at specific sites in Odesa and Mykolaiv on March 3, an attack that the U.S. intelligence agencies believed would be designed to destroy a drone storage area, an air defense gun and kill Ukrainian soldiers.
Still another entry discusses a report in February disseminated by Russia’s National Defense Command Center about the “decreased combat capability” of Russia’s forces in Eastern Ukraine.
While the documents were compiled by the Pentagon’s Joint Staff, they contain intelligence from many agencies, including the National Security Agency, the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and the Central Intelligence Agency. Some of the material is labeled as having been collected under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or F.I.S.A., noting that its further distribution is not allowed without the permission of the attorney general.
