He US Department of Justice has opened a criminal investigation into the leak of documents Pentagon that “appear to contain sensitive and highly classified material” exposing the extent of US wiretapping of key allies including South Korea, Israel and Ukraine. The confidential US information leaked and disseminated on social networks does not include very sensitive plans, says Washington, but the authorities of this country fear that it could provide key clues for the Russian military and, above all, anger its closest allies, the what seems to be spied.
Analysts consulted by The New York Times newspaper, which gave the exclusive, affirm that it is difficult to estimate the real damage of this data leak for the Ukrainian offensive. For now, Ukraine has already altered some of its military plans due to the leaking of secrets related to its strategy in the war against russiaa source close to Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelensky told CNN.
The most sensitive data splashes even to South Korea. According to the leak, The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was intercepting communications from the South Korean government about the possible shipment of aid to Ukraine in the context of the invasion of Russia. The Joe Biden government appears to have been pressuring Seoul to supply artillery shells to Ukraine.
The United States also reportedly put pressure on Israel to transfer weapons to the government of Volodymyr Zelensky. But the most sensitive data has to do with the disclosure of a “top secret” document on the supposed role of the Mossad intelligence services as a promoter of the social protests in the streets against the judicial reform of the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This information has already been denied by the Netanyahu government.
Another sensitive leak, it is not known if manipulated by those who leaked the secret data, there are several images showing the daily location of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Some US officials warned that the documents had been altered. The leaked material refers to the capabilities of the Russian and Ukrainian armies and specifically describes the “critical shortage of air defense munitions” and discusses “the advances made by Russian troops around the eastern city of bakhmut“. On the Russian situation, one of the documents dated February 23 points out that the Ukraine’s S-300 air defense systems will be depleted on May 2 at current usage rate. CNN also ensures that one of the leaked documents dated February is titled “Russia-Ukraine: The battle for the Donbas region is likely to head towards a stalemate through 2023.”
The Kremlin has affirmed this Monday that the leaked documents are “quite interesting” and has stressed that “it cannot be ruled out” that the United States has been spying on the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, in the framework of the war unleashed in February 2022. “The fact that the United States began surveillance of various heads of state a long time ago, especially in European capitals, has repeatedly come to light and has caused several scandals,” said the spokesman for the Russian Presidency, Dimitri Peskov, according to the Russian newspaper ‘Izvestia’.
Thus, he has argued that “it cannot be ruled out” that Washington spied on Zelensky, after the US television network CNN reported over the weekend that one of the leaked documents would point in this direction.
The author of the leak
Who has leaked so much confidential data and in such detail? From the US it is suggested that it was the Russians, but nothing is clear yet. Michael Mulroya former senior Pentagon official, told Reuters that “investigators’ attention is pointing to a US leak, as many of the documents were only in the hands of the US.”
The documents appeared online last month in the discord platform. These are photos of crumpled documents placed on top of magazines and surrounded by other objects. It’s as if they were hastily folded and stuffed into a pocket before being removed from a safe place, a source familiar with such documents told CNN.
In 2013, Edward Snowdenthen an analyst of the US National Security Agency (NSA, for its acronym in English), decided to leak hundreds of classified documents to various media, causing an earthquake in the network and putting diplomatic relations with the closest allies of the White House in trouble. These leaks highlighted that this agency had access to telephone and Internet records of millions of users of the telephone operator. Verizon. The information indicated that the NSA and the FBI collected data directly from the servers of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple. The NSA had also tapped the mobile phones of world leaders such as Angela Merkel and Dilma Rousseff.
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