US Observation of the D-Day Donbas Leak: A Critical Look at the “Top Secret” Pentagon Documents and their Detection
The freshness of the ” top secret” documents and hints that they hold for operations to come make these disclosures particularly damaging. On Sunday, Sabrina Singh, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said U.S. officials had notified congressional committees of the leak and referred the matter to the Justice Department, which had opened an investigation.
Some of the documents, which US officials say are authentic, expose the extent of US eavesdropping on key allies, including South Korea, Israel and Ukraine.
Highlighting US concerns about the Wagner Group, which has thousands of personnel operating in Ukraine, the documents discuss Wagner’s renewed recruitment of Russian prisoners to fight in Ukraine – underscoring its leader’s “continued influence with Putin,” one report says – and the group’s plans to strengthen its presence across Africa and in Haiti.
It is providing detailed targeting data. The train that delivers the weapons to the Ukrainians is coordinated by it. A Feb. 22 document made clear American officials were preparing for a year in which the battle for the Donbas was likely heading towards a stalemate that would frustrate Russia.
A Defense official said that the Joint Staff is looking at its distributionlists to see who gets the reports. Many of the documents have markings indicating that they are from the Joint Staff intelligence arm known as J2, and look like briefings.
The Pentagon is continuing to review the matter, and has referred it to the Justice Department, which has already begun an investigation into the source of the leak.
Pentagon Leaked Documents: US Spying allies foes and the Ukraine-Ukraine Battle for the Donbas Region Likely Heading for a Stalemate
The documents appeared online last month on the social media platform Discord, according to screenshots of the posts reviewed by CNN. The posts are pictures of papers laid on top of magazines and surrounded by objects such as zip-close bags and Gorilla Glue. It is as if they had been hastily folded up and shoved into a pocket before being removed from a secure location, a source familiar with these kinds of documents told CNN.
The US is expected to give a damage assessment to us in the next few days. Right now we are doing our own,” said an official from a country that is part of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing arrangement with the US, which includes Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.
The official also pointed out that it was alarming to see one of the documents from February titled “Russia-Ukraine: Battle for the Donbas Region Likely Heading for a Stalemate throughout the year. The document notes the challenges with assessing the “endurance of Ukraine’s operations.”
“Gains for Ukraine will be hard to accomplish, but it does not help to have the private US assessment pointing to a likely yearlong stalemate revealed publicly,” the official said.
The US has spied on Zelensky, according to one document. That is unsurprising, according to the source who is close to Zelensky.
The US was also able to intercept the Russian strategy for combating NATO tanks due to enter Ukraine beginning in April. The plan “called for establishing three fire zones based on range – long, medium, and short – with each zone covered by specific weaponry and unit types,” the US intelligence report says.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/09/politics/pentagon-leaked-documents-us-spying-allies-foes/index.html
The Interference Between Russia and Ukraine: Russian and Israeli Signals, and the Podolyak-Peskov Report on Twitter and Telegram
Signals intelligence includes intercepted communications and is broadly defined by the National Security Agency as “intelligence derived from electronic signals and systems used by foreign targets, such as communications systems, radars, and weapons systems.”
Asked about the images circulating on Twitter and Telegram, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told CNN on Friday that “we don’t have the slightest doubt about direct or indirect involvement of the United States and NATO in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.”
Mykhailo Podolyak, the adviser to the head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, said on his Telegram channel Friday that he believes the documents that have been disseminated are inauthentic, have “nothing to do with Ukraine’s real plans” and are based on “a large amount of fictitious information” disseminated by Russia.
Yet another document describes, in remarkable detail, a conversation between two senior South Korean national security officials about concerns by the country’s National Security Council over a US request for ammunition.
The officials worried that the US supplying the bullets would be in violation of South Korea’s policy of not giving lethal aid to war-torn countries. One of the officials suggested that he sell the bullets to Poland so that they didn’t change the policy.
Several diplomats said that officials from other countries would also be raising the issue with Washington, but they haven’t had those conversations yet as they wait to see what the administration says.
The statement stated that the Mossad and its senior officials did not encourage agency personnel to participate in political demonstrations. The serving senior personnel of the Mossad are dedicated to the value of service to the state that has guided the company since it’s founding and they don’t engage in the issue of the demonstrations at all.
The Israeli Prime Minister’s Office responded on the Mossad’s behalf Sunday morning, calling the report “mendacious and without any foundation whatsoever.”
The document, titled “Israel: Pathways to Providing Lethal Aid to Ukraine,” says Jerusalem “likely will consider providing lethal aid under increased US pressure or a perceived degradation” in its relationship with Russia.
On February 23, the report says, Bulgaria expressed willingness to donate its fleet of MiG-29 jets to Ukraine – a “challenge,” the report assesses, because it will leave Bulgaria without fighter aircraft to fulfill its air policing missions until US-made F-16s are delivered, “which is at least a year away.”
Much of the information about Russia was gathered via intercepted communications, raising concerns that the Russians might now change their method of communication to better conceal their planning.
In fact, the documents released so far are a brief snapshot of how the United States viewed the war in Ukraine. Many pages seem to come right out of the briefing books circulating among the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and in a few cases updates from the C.I.A.’s operations center. They are a combination of the current order of battle and — perhaps most valuable to Russian military planners — American projections of where the air defenses being rushed into Ukraine could be located next month.
The documents gave a window into casualty figures on both sides and the US has been hesitant to share publicly in detail.
As of the month of February, as many as 223,000 Russian forces had been killed in action, according to one document. About 17,500 people were killed in action in Ukraine, according to the report.
Analysts say bad actors are already using the leaked documents to spread misinformation. The document with casualty numbers, for example, was altered in recent weeks to more than halve the number of Russian deaths, before being spread on pro-Russian Telegram channels.
“This level of involvement is rising, is rising gradually,” he said. “We keep our eye on this process. It makes the whole story more complicated, but it can’t change the outcome of the special operation.
One senior Western intelligence official summed up the disclosures as “a nightmare.” According to Alperovitch, there are a number of ways this can be damaging. He said that the possibility that Russian intelligence could use the pages on social media to get information about the G.R.U., their military intelligence service and the movement of military units was included.
To recap: A small number of secret military documents were found on Twitter and Telegram on Wednesday, and researchers and social media sleuths have since discovered more on other sites — some posted as early as March 1.
The documents viewed by NPR appear to be briefing slides — put together daily for top Pentagon and national security officials — focused on Ukraine, with maps and charts pertaining to their troops and weapons, national security correspondent Greg Myre told Morning Edition.
What is the State of National Security? The Story of Brandon Van Grack and the Ukraine Documents Leaked by Edward Snowden and the FBI and the Intelligence Committee
While there’s still a lot we don’t know, former Justice Department “leak czar” Brandon Van Grack says national security damage has certainly been done.
The only debate is the extent of the damage and whether it is still live. We don’t know if an individual or a group of individuals still have access to secrets, and so this must be the top priority right now.
Van Grack held multiple national security-focused roles at the Justice Department, including leading the investigation into Edward Snowden after the then-National Security Agency contractor leaked thousands of documents in 2013. In the past, Van Grack was a business partner at Morrison & Foerster. One of the sites where theUkraine documents were shared are now represented by him.
He spoke with Morning Edition’s A Martínez on Monday about what could be happening behind the scenes as law enforcement and intelligence officials work together to try to plug the leak and remediate the damage.
The FBI along with the DOJ is identifying what third parties, what companies may have relevant information, and issuing search warrants and subpoenas and that’s probably what’s been occurring through the weekend. The intelligence committee in coordination with the the FBI is also reviewing the leaked documents to see if they can identify … who had access to them and any other identifying features.
There are multiple places to start, which is from the FBI, DOJ perspective, all of the reporting of companies and individuals who may have posted this or where it may have been posted, you’re collecting that evidence. You are closely coordinating with the intelligence community. There are multiple documents, and there are images in those documents … and I think you are culling through that information to try to narrow the group of individuals who may have had access to it.
You’re chewing gum while walking. Identifying who this person or these persons are is the main goal at the moment. That has to be the priority. As that’s going on, to the extent that they do identify someone, then you’re starting to put together a charging document and figure out that aspect of it. Right now, the priority is to identify the leak and make sure that no one else is getting it.
Because of special counsel appointments we don’t know exactly what the overlap is, but there should be some overlap of those individuals and expertise. A group of people who have been sprinting for the past few months on certain cases need to do some type of shift to focus on this at the moment.
This case shows why it is so critical that we enforce criminally the laws that make it unlawful to willfully retain or disclose classified information. There’s millions of Americans that have access to … untold amounts of classified information, and they can’t all be monitored. And the way that you control that access, and ensure that it’s not disclosed to people that don’t have access, is to enforce these laws.