Dozens of leaked Defense Department classified documents posted online reveal details of U.S. spying on Russia’s war machine in Ukraine and secret assessments of Ukraine’s combat power, as well as intelligence gathering on America’s allies, including South Korea and Israel.
NBC News obtained more than 50 of the leaked documents, many of them labeled “Top Secret,” the highest level of classification.
The documents first appeared online in March, and a senior U.S. official said Saturday that the government’s “working theory” is that they are real, although some of them could have been altered.
The full impact of the leak remains unclear, but it could represent the most serious breach of U.S. intelligence secrets since a contractor for the National Security Agency, Edward Snowden, passed on thousands of classified documents to journalists about U.S. electronic surveillance in 2013. In this case, the scale of the disclosure is much smaller, involving dozens instead of thousands of documents.
The documents include repeated references to information based on secret signals intelligence — electronic eavesdropping — a crucial pillar of U.S. intelligence-gathering. A former U.S. intelligence official said the disclosure of some signals intelligence reporting about Russia and its spy agencies could cause significant damage if Moscow is able to cut off those sources of information.
It remains unclear how the trove of documents ended up on various social media sites.
In a statement over the weekend, deputy Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh said, “The Department of Defense continues to review and assess the validity of the photographed documents that are circulating on social media sites and that appear to contain sensitive and highly classified material. An interagency effort has been stood up, focused on assessing the impact these photographed documents could have on U.S. national security and on our Allies and partners. Over the weekend, U.S. officials have engaged with Allies and partners and have informed relevant congressional committees of jurisdiction about the disclosure. The Department of Defense’s highest priority is the defense of our nation and our national security. We have referred this matter to the Department of Justice, which has opened a criminal investigation.”
The New York Times first reported the leak last week. The Times and The Washington Post first reported the contents of some of the same documents obtained by NBC News. The open-source investigative group Bellingcat said the documents first appeared on the Discord social media platform in March.
Many of the documents that NBC News obtained, dated from February to March, appear to be briefing slides prepared by the U.S. military’s Joint Staff and refer to information gleaned from an array of U.S. intelligence agencies, including the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office, which oversees U.S. spy satellites. Some of the documents carry the label NOFORN, which prohibits the information from being shared with foreign partners.
Although U.S. officials believe the documents are most likely authentic, at least one of those obtained by NBC News appears to have been doctored, with two versions of the document appearing online, providing different estimates of Russian casualty figures.
The leak will also raise fresh questions among U.S. allies about whether Washington can be trusted with secret information. It remains unclear whether the leak is the result of a hack by a foreign adversary or whether the disclosure came from within the U.S. government or through a U.S. ally with access to American intelligence reporting.