An investigation by the newspaper “The Washington Post” has revealed that the alleged author of the leak classified US intelligence documents is, according to statements by a member of the group in which the documents were shared, a worker at a military base.
According to the newspaper’s source, a minor member of a private group in the Discord Messaging Service, The alleged author of the leaks is a man between the ages of 20 and 25 who for months sent the documents to his colleagues in the chat group, first reproduced by hand, and later by photographs.
In this way, there is increasing evidence that the leak was not an intelligence operation by Russia or any state actor with the aim of discrediting the US, but rather the consequence of a Pentagon policy to give top-secret security clearances. to a large number of service members, both civilians and contractors.
The group in which these messages were shared was created during the pandemic in the most popular messaging network for young people and teenagers who love video games. According to the group member, In his chat there were more than 20 people, the vast majority of them young men and adolescents who shared a right-wing, religious and gun-friendly ideology..
The alleged perpetrator, the oldest in the group, would have been explaining to the other members the meaning of the military jargon in the documents, and he would have boasted of revealing things that “the Government does not want them to know”, always according to the investigation of the aforementioned newspaper.
He member of the group has also claimed that he did not send anything by mistake, that he knew for sure what he was doingand that he knows the real name, as well as the location of the alleged author of the leaks, although he has expressed that he will wait for the investigation that the US Intelligence Services are currently carrying out.
The newspaper has had access to videos sent to the group by the alleged author of the leaks – who some members describe as an uncle or almost a father figure – in which he is at a shooting range, uttering racist and anti-Semitic insults before shoot the target.
On one occasion, the source has revealed, the alleged perpetrator became angry with the other members of the group, as it had happened “an hour each day writing these very long messages in which he often made notes and explanations of things that we normal citizens would not understand”, getting angry at the apparent lack of interest from the younger ones, threatening to stop sending out the leaks.
The main rule that the alleged author of the leaks imposed on his colleagues was do not post the documents anywhereaccording to the source consulted by the newspaper, which adds that the group included people from outside the United States, including Russia and Ukraine.
According to the aforementioned mediaon February 28, the first batch of documents, shared by some of the users, left the group -their source does not know who it was- in another chat on the messaging network they used, and from there to more and more groups, although the Intelligence Services did not report proof of these leaks until a month later.
In mid-March, the alleged author of the leaks stopped publishing documents, and a day before the first US outlet reported the alleged leak, he wrote to the group in a he was “frantic”, assuring that “something had happened, and he prayed to God that this did not happen”.
After the case went public, the members of the group jumped to another server to continue their conversations, in which the alleged author of the leaks confessed to feeling “confused and lost about what to do next.” He finally asked the rest of the group members to delete all the documents and all the messages and disappeared, something that according to the source consulted by ‘The Washington Post’, “felt like losing a family member, we all cried”.
In addition, he has stated that he believes that, when the Intelligence Services find the alleged author of the leaks -something that he assumes will happen-, he will not have a fair trial and will instead be sent to “Guantánamo or some dark place”, and he has even added that he may be “murdered”.
Russia’s response
Until now, Russia has kept a low profile on confidential Pentagon leaks. Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov suggested on Wednesday that the leak could be a US disinformation ploy. “DSince the United States is a party to the conflict and is essentially waging a hybrid war against us, it is possible that such techniques are being used to deceive their opponent, the Russian Federation,” Ryabkov told Russian news agencies.
One of the revelations in the leaked documents indicates that NATO countries such as France, Latvia and the United Kingdom have soldiers posted in Ukraine helping the Kyiv Army in its strategy against Russia. The Kremlin spokesman, Dimitri Peskov, has assured that they already knew that countries of the Atlantic Alliance were “participating” in the war in Ukraine even before the leak of classified documents. “Long before the appearance of these documents, we had and still have information that many instructors from NATO countries, including the UK, and fighters are taking part in the hostilities,” Peskov assured the media, according to TASS.
However, the Kremlin spokesman has also wanted to be cautious and has stressed that, for the moment, there is no possibility of demonstrating the veracity of these US Pentagon documents leaked since February, but which have not gained notoriety until last week. According to these files, The United States and NATO would have plans to prepare the Ukrainian Armed Forces for a counteroffensive to retake the territory taken by force by Russia in the framework of a war that has been going on for almost fourteen months.
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