The FBI is working to track down who leaking of sensitive and secret defense and intelligence documents and shared them on social media, and at the same time the Pentagon is reducing the number of people who have access to the kind of classified information that has been leaked.
The number of people on government-wide distribution lists receiving classified updates has dropped significantly since Friday, US officials said. Before escape it was revealed, around 1,000 people typically had access to such documents. CBS News has reviewed a series of leaked documents, all printed in color with text, graphics or maps that appear to have been folded, unfolded, then photographed and shared on social media sites like 4Chan and Discord.
The Pentagon’s internal review of the matter will be led by Milancy Harris, deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence and security. The review will investigate the scope and scale of the leak and the impact on the national security of the United States and allies, and examine how information flows and who has access to it.
The FBI is leading the criminal investigation, which is only in its early stages, according to a US official familiar with the investigation. Former officials familiar with leak investigations predicted that identifying the source could happen quickly because “the universe of possibilities is relatively small.”
A US official indicated that not all printers are authorized to print classified documents, and those that are authorized log a unique identifier when they print, so this may provide some clues to the leaker’s search.
In the intelligence community, spokespeople for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the CIA, the National Security Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office largely declined to comment on the leaked documents, referring inquiries to the Department of Justice while it conducts an investigation into the source. It is not yet clear whether ODNI has launched or will launch its own risk assessment.
However, CIA Director William Burns, at an event hosted by Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy on Tuesday evening, briefly referenced the leak of classified documents to answer questions after a speech He called the leak “deeply unfortunate” and a priority “probably as intense as anything” in his inbox.
“It’s something that the US government takes very seriously,” he added, citing the FBI and Defense Department investigation as a reason for not going into more detail.
A senior US intelligence official offered a brief and bleak assessment of the leaks: “It’s not good.”
However, a US official said on Tuesday that he has seen no indication other than media reports that Ukraine has been forced to change its battle plan as a result of the leaked documents.
And several former intelligence officials, including two who served in senior positions during the Edward Snowden i Chelsea Manning leakshe said that this disclosure, what is known so far, is not quite comparable in its scale.
“In a way, what this tells you is that the systems that were put in place to prevent mass theft of information, for example flash drives, are working,” said one former senior official. “Here, it appears, instead, that someone actually took documents out of the building the old-fashioned way.”
Those officials, who were only familiar with press summaries of the documents and could not speak to their authenticity, acknowledged that some of the disclosures appear particularly damaging to signals intelligence sources (hard-to-create electronic access or recreate once gone), but they seem, for now, to have a minimal effect for human sources.
“I don’t think there’s much damage here,” one official said, even because of the ramifications of the battlefield in Ukraine. “People assume this was all new to the Russians, it probably wasn’t.”
The documents are said to resemble daily briefing materials for top members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who typically receive them six days a week. A team of several dozen people gathered a first crop of materials from various government agencies, which may include the kind of graphics and analysis that have appeared in the leaks.
“US agencies should be out there looking for classified information, doing web sweeps, every day,” one official said. “That took too long to identify.”
David Martin contributed to this report.
Trending news
Eleanor Watson
