INSIDER THREATSPentagon Leak of U.S. Intelligence on Ukraine and Other Allies Shows Failure to Learn from Chelsea Manning Affair
To ask how someone so young as Jack Teixeira had access to secrets is to ask the wrong questions. It is perfectly reasonable for someone of his age to be security cleared and have access to classified material, but only if they need to know the information. But it is not immediately clear why the Massachusetts Air National Guard needs top-secret intelligence about Ukraine. More baffling is why there were not greater controls in place.
The world’s media was predictably alive last three weeks ago with speculation about Jack Teixeira, the young US guardsman who was charged in a case involving leaked confidential US defense and intelligence documents. The actual charge levelled against the 21-year-old Airman First Class is the “unauthorized retention and transmission of national defense information, and unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents”, for which he could receive 15 years in prison if found guilty on all counts.
What many people wanted to know is how such a young and relatively junior officer had access to such an array of secrets. And how US intelligence security could have allowed him to allegedly share this classified material on a Discord server normally used to discuss video games.
The affair suggests that US intelligence agencies are still as vulnerable to this kind of leak as it was at the time of Chelsea Manning in 2010. Manning, an army intelligence analyst was released from a US military prison in 2017 having served only a short portion of a 35-year sentence for leaking classified – Iraq war – intelligence material to Wikileaks.
This is important because for Ukraine some of the intelligence that Kyiv is sharing is very sensitive, providing updates about the country’s capabilities. This intelligence showed how the Ukrainian government views the status of the war, including the conflict raging near Bakhmut. Ukraine will be rightly dismayed, but they are heavily reliant on the US for much of their sophisticated military capability and so cannot restrict intelligence flows.
For the UK, most attention focused on the confirmation in the leaked documents that British special forces are operating in Ukraine. This will be used by Moscow to bolster the narrative that Russia is being encircled by NATO.
Russia’s large intelligence community is skilled in both electronic interception, and human intelligence through its undercover officers and informant handling. So it is unlikely that Moscow learned much new. It had made its own assessments, but these have now been confirmed through the words of its adversaries.
The leaked reports are interesting for what they don’t reveal. Russian analysts can check where the US and Ukraine do not have good coverage. More importantly, the intelligence trove will show how US, Ukraine and other countries’ analysts are assessing the progress of the war. The details are secondary to understanding how the allies are thinking.
