Pentagon secrets: leakage or seeping

After FBI arrested Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard charged with making secret Pentagon documents publicly available, the emotional wave caused by this "sentinel" event began to wane.

However, its nature does not stand up to scrutiny in itself. Incidents of the kind occur with unfailing regularity every now and then throughout the entire US history. Suffice it to recall the 1971 leak of Pentagon Documents in the midst of the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal and the notorious Wikileaks revelations about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, authored by US Army private Bradley Manning.

The biographies of Teixeira and Manning are interestingly similar in some ways — both come of respectable families, with their fathers having been role-model US servicemen. I would be hardly surprised if Teixeira follows in his predecessor’s footsteps — changes his gender after receiving a prison sentence and is pardoned.

So, what can we say about the latest leak of American secrets after the "dust has settled»? As per terminology, this implies a public disclosure of sealed records classified as secret, which determines the circle of people authorized to work with them. Depending on the purpose, a leak may be authorized or unauthorized. Regarding Teixeira’s case, expert opinions are divided, but most believe it was not.

However, there is another version claiming that the young computer games fan began posting top secret documents on the Discord server spontaneously, with special services joining later. The reasons behind his deed might be very different — from willing to impress other players to seeking the reputation of a truth-teller inconsistent with government policy. The "hero" will perhaps get the right answer from his lawyers only.

The theory is that the guy’s activity quickly caught the special services’ eye. It is fair to say that the appearance of such materials on social media, especially in such numbers and with such characteristic features, is effectively monitored by the NSA. In the future, Teixeira could be used "blindly", left alone for some time in order to become the genie to be let out of the bottle when the time is right.

There are a number of arguments favoring this scenario. First of all, Jack Teixeira himself is not quite suitable for the role of a leak source, if picked up in advance. Sluggish attempts to find some "Moscow’s hand" in this story failed over futility. It was even found in the background of John F. Kennedy’s official assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald who lived in the Soviet Union for some time. As for Teixeira's past, the worst thing was the fact of firing from a "Soviet" pistol. Surely not quite enough...

The leakage method raises questions as well, failing to comply with American special services’ pattern. The documents were being revealed via the Discord server for quite a long time, arousing no interest to a certain point. The entire hype was triggered by a relevant piece in the NYT, a newspaper known for its special relationship with the intelligence community.

The content of documents Teixeira leaked is also curious and appears as a mixture of diverse information of varying degrees of credibility. Therefore, it is quite likely that Teixeira started revealing information necessary for operation masterminds at some stage. As for potential misinformation contained in them, it is certainly here to stay. However, one has to bear in mind that any misinformation loses its meaning if verified within a reasonable amount of time.

In this regard, we are mostly interested in documents related to Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine. This is what Dmitry Peskov said on the issue: "This [Teixeira's actions] is rather the concern of American special services. Our worry is to analyze the data and study them carefully, while keeping to question their reliability. Analyzing such reports is rather the prerogative of our special services."

Indeed, it won’t be difficult for intelligence analysts to figure out the reliability of information leaked. Any intelligence deliverables are verified by tried and tested procedure and algorithms. In this particular case, military intelligence data obtained should be either confirmed or refuted by other types such as space, radio, clandestine, cryptanalytical, operational, etc. All the sources have varying degrees of reliability, with a true picture only possible through comprehensive analysis.

If so, one may assume that Teixeira’s materials are predominantly political, not military information useful for both achieving foreign policy and domestic goals, as the presidential race begins in the United States.