New Batch of Classified Documents Appears on Social Media Sites

On Friday, a new set of classified documents that seemed to reveal American national security secrets from China to Ukraine to the Middle East appeared on social media platforms. This has caused concern among Pentagon officials and has added to the already existing chaos, which caught the Biden administration off guard. U.S. officials have warned that the size and sensitivity of the documents could cause significant damage. One senior intelligence official called the situation a "nightmare for the Five Eyes" countries, including the United States, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, who share intelligence with each other.

The latest documents were discovered on Twitter and other sites on Friday, a day after the Biden administration announced that it was investigating a potential leak of classified Ukrainian war plans, including a worrisome evaluation of Ukraine's air defense capabilities. One of the slides, dated February 23 and marked "Secret/NoForn," indicating it was not intended for foreign countries to view.

According to Mick Mulroy, a former senior Pentagon official, the leak of the classified documents is a significant security breach that could impede Ukrainian military planning. Since many of the leaked documents appeared to be photographs of physical documents, he believes that it was a deliberate leak aimed at harming the efforts of Ukraine, the United States, and NATO.

According to one analyst, the information that has been uncovered so far represents only a small portion of the total amount of leaked data, with much more likely still to be revealed.

Early on Friday, senior national security officials who were dealing with the initial leak - which was first reported by The New York Times - expressed concern that the information that had been leaked may not be the only intelligence that was compromised.

By Friday afternoon, it was clear that their fears were justified. While officials at the Pentagon and national security agencies were investigating the source of documents that had appeared on Twitter and Telegram, another document was discovered on 4chan, an anonymous and extreme message board. This document is a map that claims to depict the situation in the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, which has been the site of a violent and protracted conflict.

However, the leaked documents seem to extend far beyond just highly classified information on Ukraine's war plans. According to security analysts who have examined the documents that have been appearing on various social media platforms, the growing collection includes delicate briefing slides on a range of other topics, such as China, the military operations in the Indo-Pacific region, the Middle East, and terrorism.

The Pentagon issued a statement on Thursday stating that the Defense Department was investigating the situation. However, on Friday, as more information continued to emerge, officials from the department stated that they had no further comments at this time. Privately, officials from various national security agencies have admitted that they are urgently searching for the source of the leaks and are concerned that there may be a steady stream of classified information being posted on various websites.

The documents related to Ukraine's military are presented as photographs of charts outlining expected weapons deliveries, troop and battalion strengths, and other plans. Officials at the Pentagon have confirmed that these are genuine Defense Department documents. However, the copies that have been made public seem to have been altered in certain ways from their original format. For instance, modified versions of the documents appear to exaggerate the number of Ukrainian casualties and downplay the estimates of Russian troops who have been killed.

On Friday, both Ukrainian officials and Russian pro-war bloggers suggested that the leak was part of a disinformation campaign orchestrated by the opposing side, timed to influence Ukraine's potential spring offensive to retake territory in the eastern and southern parts of the country.

A senior Ukrainian official stated that the leak appeared to be a Russian strategy to undermine a counteroffensive, while Russian bloggers cautioned against trusting any of the information, which one blogger suggested could be the work of "Western intelligence" intended to mislead their command.

Behind closed doors, embarrassed national security officials were attempting to determine the perpetrator of the leak. One official speculated that the documents most likely did not originate from Ukrainian officials because they did not have access to the specific plans, which bore the imprint of the Pentagon's Joint Staff offices. A second official noted that identifying who had access to the documents would be the first step in determining how they were leaked.

According to Aric Toler, an analyst at Bellingcat, the Dutch investigative site, the initial set of documents seemed to have been posted on Discord, a social media chat platform popular with video gamers, in early March.

Lt. Col. Yurii Bereza, a battalion commander with Ukraine's National Guard, brushed off the news of the leak, saying that information warfare had become so intense that it was difficult to distinguish truth from lies. He added that they were at a stage of the war where the information war was sometimes more important than the physical clashes at the front. One soldier in his unit, Maksym, expressed anger and said they had their own problems to deal with. Experts outside Ukraine found it challenging to draw conclusions about who leaked the information and why.

According to Kyle Walter, the head of research at Logically, a British firm that tracks disinformation, many voices on Russian Telegram channels are calling the unaltered photo showing high Russian casualties and low Ukrainian casualties a "Western influence" operation. The pro-Kremlin voices are claiming that it is an attempt to instill poor morale in Russia and Russian forces. Meanwhile, Jonathan Teubner, the chief executive of FilterLabs AI, which tracks messaging in Russia, suggests that the leak could be a Russian operation meant to sow distrust between Washington and Kyiv. Walter also notes that altering stolen documents is a frequent Russian disinformation tactic, including some documents that were purportedly leaked from the Ukrainian government, but Ukraine's government generally dismisses them as altered or out of context. The doctored photo showing lower casualty numbers for Russia and higher ones for Ukraine has been discussed more frequently in Western-oriented social media than in Russian-focused platforms.

It appears that the use of leaked documents as part of propaganda campaigns and disinformation is not uncommon in conflicts, according to Kyle Walter, the head of research at Logically, a British firm that tracks disinformation. He notes that the Ukraine war has seen more document leaks than other conflicts due to the role of open-source and declassified intelligence. However, the specifics of what is going on with the American documents are still unclear. While altering stolen documents for propaganda purposes is a frequent tactic used by Russia, the origin and motive of the leaked American documents remain unknown.

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