The Pentagon may not be the source of the leak of purported US intelligence documents that recently surfaced online, Fox News has claimed, citing “conversations with a variety of American defense and intelligence officials.”
The trove of dozens of documents had been circulating online for weeks, possibly months, but came under media and government scrutiny last week. The images of printed materials were described by news outlets as the biggest leak from the US government since the publication by WikiLeaks of thousands of classified documents related to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Many of the papers focus on the Ukraine crisis and appear to be Pentagon briefings prepared for senior US officials. Fox noted that if secure devices were used “investigators can track where they were printed.”
The news network also pointed out that some of the intelligence appears to originate from outside agencies, such as the CIA and National Security Agency (NSA). Those materials would not be easily accessible to Pentagon employees, so their inclusion suggests the leak came from outside the military, according to Fox News.
The US government has neither confirmed nor denied the authenticity of the documents. However, it launched a large-scale intra-department investigation into the apparent breach.
Among other things, the batch of documents indicated that the US was spying on some of its closest allies and that it was publicly displaying more confidence in Ukraine’s military capabilities than it actually had.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin gave assurances that his department treats the situation “very seriously” and pledged to “turn over every rock” to get to the bottom of what happened. He could not explain how the leak remained unnoticed for such a long time.