THE U.S. government is scrambling to assess and contain the fallout from a major leak of classified Pentagon documents that has rattled their officials, members of Congress and key U.S. allies in recent days.

The Justice Department is investigating how the trove of highly sensitive documents ended up on social media sites.

The Defense Department is still reviewing the matter and has taken steps to tighten the flow of such highly sensitive documents, officials said, which are normally available on any given day to hundreds of people across the government.

The Pentagon has stood up an “interagency effort” to assess the impact of the leak, but U.S. officials and close allies already fear the revelations could jeopardize sensitive sources and compromise important foreign relationships.

Congressional lawmakers have also expressed concerns about the apparent scope of the leak and sensitivity of the documents posted online but largely remain in the dark about what has occurred.

What happened?

The documents appeared online in March on the social media platform Discord. The posts are photos of crumpled documents laid on top of magazines and surrounded by other random objects, such as zip-close bags and Gorilla Glue. It is as if they had been hastily folded up and shoved into a pocket before being removed from a secure location.

A Discord spokesperson confirmed in a statement Sunday that they are cooperating with law enforcement on the investigation.

The documents contain a wide range of highly classified information — providing a rare window into how the U.S. spies on allies and adversaries alike.

Some of the documents, which U.S. officials say are authentic, expose the extent of U.S. eavesdropping on key allies, including South Korea, Israel and Ukraine.

Others reveal the degree to which the U.S. has penetrated the Russian Ministry of Defense and the Russian mercenary organization Wagner Group, largely through intercepted communications and human sources, which could now be cut off or put in danger.

Still others divulge key weaknesses in Ukrainian weaponry, air defense, and battalion sizes and readiness at a critical point in the war, as Ukrainian forces gear up to launch a counteroffensive against the Russians — and just as the U.S. and Ukraine have begun to develop a closer relationship over intelligence-sharing.

One document reveals that the U.S. has been spying on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. That is unsurprising, said a source close to Zelensky, but Ukrainian officials are deeply frustrated about the leak.

The U.S. intelligence report, which is sourced to signals intelligence, says that Zelensky in late February “suggested striking Russian deployment locations in Russia’s Rostov Oblast” using unmanned aerial vehicles, since Ukraine does not have long-range weapons capable of reaching that far.

Signals intelligence includes intercepted communications and is broadly defined by the National Security Agency as “intelligence derived from electronic signals and systems used by foreign targets, such as communications systems, radars, and weapons systems.”

Yet another document describes, in remarkable detail, a conversation between two senior South Korean national security officials about concerns by the country’s National Security Council over a U.S. request for ammunition.

The officials worried that supplying the ammunition, which the U.S. would then send to Ukraine, would violate South Korea’s policy of not supplying lethal aid to countries at war. According to the document, one of the officials then suggested a way of getting around the policy without actually changing it — by selling the ammunition to Poland.

The document has already sparked controversy in Seoul, with South Korean officials telling reporters that they plan to raise the issue with Washington.

An intelligence report about Israel, meanwhile, has sparked outrage in Jerusalem. The report, produced by the CIA and sourced to signals intelligence, says that Israel’s main intelligence agency, the Mossad, had been encouraging protests against the country’s new government — “including several explicit calls to action,” the report alleges.

Frustrated allies

While U.S. allies are aware that the U.S. intelligence community collects information on friendly nations, diplomats from some of the countries mentioned said it was frustrating — and harmful to the U.S. reputation — to see that information exposed publicly.

U.S. allies are doing damage assessments, scrambling to determine whether any of their own sources and methods have been compromised by the leak.

“We expect the U.S. to share a damage assessment with us in the coming days, but we cannot wait for their assessment. Right now we are doing our own,” said an official from a country that is part of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing arrangement with the U.S., which includes Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.

“We are poring over these documents to figure out if any of the intelligence originated from our collection,” the official said.

A second Five Eyes nation official pointed out that it was alarming to see one of the documents from February titled “Russia-Ukraine: Battle for the Donbas Region Likely Heading for a Stalemate Throughout 2023.”

“Gains for Ukraine will be hard to accomplish, but it does not help to have the private U.S. assessment pointing to a likely yearlong stalemate revealed publicly,” the official said.

Mykhailo Podolyak, the adviser to the head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, said on his Telegram channel Friday that he believes the documents that have been disseminated are inauthentic, have “nothing to do with Ukraine’s real plans” and are based on “a large amount of fictitious information” disseminated by Russia.

Meanwhile, the Kremlin has criticized what it called a “general tendency” to blame Russia for things when asked about initial accusations that Moscow was behind the leak of U.S. intelligence documents, China’s media outlet CGTN said.

U.S. government officials “are engaging with allies and partners at high levels over this including to reassure them of our commitment to safeguarding intelligence and the fidelity of securing our partnerships” following the leak, State Department principal deputy spokesperson Vedant Patel said Monday.

At the State Department, Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman has been tapped to lead the diplomatic response.

Patel would not go into details about which countries the U.S. has engaged with, only saying “that work is ongoing.”

Investigations

The Justice Department has launched an investigation and the Defense Department is also reviewing the matter.

“The Department of Defense continues to review and assess the validity of the photographed documents that are circulating on social media sites and that appear to contain sensitive and highly classified material,” Pentagon deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh said in a statement over the weekend. “An interagency effort has been stood up, focused on assessing the impact these photographed documents could have on U.S. national security and on our Allies and partners.”

The Joint Staff, which comprises the Defense Department’s most senior uniformed leadership that advises the president, is examining its distribution lists to look at who gets these reports, a Defense official said. Many of the documents had markings indicating that they had been produced by the Joint Staff’s intelligence arm, known as J2, and appear to be briefing documents.

Asked if the government has any sense of who leaked the documents, National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby said Monday that the Department of Defense had referred the case to the Department of Justice for criminal investigation and directed questions to them.

Asked if the administration believed the leak is contained or if there’s an ongoing threat, Kirby responded: “We don’t know. We truly don’t.”

(SD-Agencies)