First, there’s the “how.” How did a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman gain access to and reveal closely held military and intelligence secrets? Then there’s the “what.” What exactly did Airman First Class Jack Douglas Teixeira post to his teenage friends on the gamer board “Thug Shaker Central”?
The “why” will await some psychiatric profile that will tell us about Teixeira’s sad, lonely life and his need to be noticed. And military counterintelligence experts are still sifting through the evidence to find answers to the “what.”
But the shocking truth is that a low-ranking Air National Guard member was able to snap hundreds of photos of classified documents and post them in the private room he created on Discord’s server.
The materials Airman Teixeira is accused of sharing revealed how deeply the Russian government had been penetrated by U.S. and allied intelligence agencies, which gained the ability to provide near-real-time information to the Ukrainians about planned Russian strikes.
They also showed that America’s spy services were eavesdropping on allies like Israel and South Korea, as well as the Ukrainian leadership, embarrassing revelations that could erode trust at a time when Washington was trying to present a unified front in the conflict with Moscow.
The Russian government goes to great lengths to prevent U.S. signals intelligence from being able to listen in on military conversations. But stupid Russian soldiers were using their cell phones to communicate at the beginning of the war. And even after being ordered not to, as late as January, they were still dying for their stupidity.
Battlefield intelligence is one thing. But getting intelligence from inside military headquarters giving Ukraine real-time information on Russian strikes suggests a human spy in Russia’s midst. Teixeira’s need to impress his online friends may have put that individual or individuals in serious danger. That kind of intelligence would almost certainly be compartmentalized, meaning Russian counterintelligence knows exactly who had access to that information.
As for our allies, they may feign outrage, but they do the same kind of intelligence gathering on us. That’s how the game is played and everyone understands it.
Teixeira may have been looking to awe his friends, but in the process of showing off, he also drew in a 17-year-old boy who didn’t have a clue about the dynamite he was posting.
The documents might have remained confined to Thug Shaker Central were it not for a member of the group named Lucca, a 17-year-old from California, who might not have fully grasped the gravity of the documents he had been given access to.
On March 2, Lucca was involved in a conversation about the Ukraine war in a public Discord group called #War-Posting when he published several dozen documents from the cache that had been uploaded to Thug Shaker Central.
For a month, the documents bounced around esoteric chat groups, including one popular with players of the online game Minecraft and another for fans of a moderately popular British YouTuber. They went seemingly unnoticed by anyone who understood their importance until early April, when some of the documents began appearing on the Telegram messaging app channels of supporters of Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Once the documents hit Telegram, it was only a matter of time. Someone at the New York Times saw the posting, and that led to the blockbuster story and the Biden administration caught with its pants down.
According to the Times story, Teixeira was in possession of the documents and took them off the airbase where he was stationed. Perusing his sister’s social media site, the Times discovered a photograph that “captured a kitchen countertop that appeared identical to the surface on which the classified documents were photographed.” How did this kid leave a classified area with photos of top-secret documents?
There’s still a lot to be unpacked from this story regarding what was leaked and how it happened. But anyone expecting some kind of superspy to have carried off the intelligence coup of the year will no doubt be disappointed in learning it was a 21-year-old gamer nerd and National Guard Airman.
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