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Pentagon leak shows perils of spying on your friends
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| The Ukrainian and U.S. flags are placed on the table during a meeting with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal at the Pentagon in D.C. on Wednesday. (Alex Brandon/AP) |
A huge leak of Pentagon documents uncovered over the past week has revealed how deeply the United States has penetrated Russia and other rivals. But it is also a reminder that the United States spies on its allies as a matter of routine — a practice that has risks for both Washington and friends alike.
There is no shortage of unflattering revelations. The documents paint a pessimistic picture of Ukraine’s upcoming spring counteroffensive and point to potential problems in air defense and artillery. One report suggests that South Korea balked at supplying weapons to Ukraine. A separate document claims Egypt secretly planned to supply rockets to Russia, while another says NATO ally Turkey was approached by Russia’s notorious Wagner Group, a private military contractor, to help procure supplies.
the topics go far beyond Ukraine, too: One assessment claimed that Israel’s famous spy agency Mossad had supported anti-government protests, despite its claims of political neutrality.
Taken together, the documents suggest that even after the controversy surrounding the National Security Agency leaks released by Edward Snowden a decade ago, the United States is still secretly collecting information about its allies. The bizarre spread of the documents — apparently first being shared between obscure meme groups on the chat app Discord — shows that the interconnectedness that enables this surveillance may be too chaotic to be fully enclosed.
My colleagues Shane Harris and Samuel Oakford reported Wednesday that the man behind the leak is a young, charismatic gun enthusiasts who shared the highly sensitive documents with a group of acquaintances searching for companionship on a Discord server he controlled, according to group members. The poster, who some call “OG,” said he spent hours transcribing classified documents from his job on a “military base” to share with the group, a Discord group member told The Washington Post. OG then began posting photos of the documents themselves.
“In those initial posts, OG had given his fellow members a small sip of the torrent of secrets that was to come. When rendering hundreds of classified files by hand proved too tiresome, he began posting hundreds of photos of documents themselves,” Oakford and Harris wrote. Many of the documents traversed subjects so sensitive that only people who had undergone months-long background checks would be authorized to see them, they added.
“If you could think it, it was in those documents,” said the Discord group member, who spoke to The Post on the condition of anonymity. He is under 18 and was a young teenager when he met OG. The Post obtained consent from his mother to speak to him and to record his remarks on video, Oakford and Harris wrote.
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Yes, some of the revelations themselves are not exactly a surprise. You don’t need espionage to understand that Viktor Orban has a negative view of the United States,
for example, even if Hungary is a NATO ally. But others have left
foreign governments reeling. And there is likely much more to come.
The allegations of arms dealing with Russia have resulted in awkward silence from Turkey and selective denials from Egypt. Meanwhile, Ukrainian officials have publicly cast doubt on the downbeat assessment in the documents, with presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak writing on Telegram last week that the reports contained “fictitious information” — though privately, some Ukrainian officials have said they recognize the picture they paint.
In South Korea, the government of President Yoon Suk Yeol suggested that the allegations in the documents were “untrue” and claimed that some of the information included was “altered.” In Israel, Mossad released a rare statement that emphasized its political neutrality, while some analysts wondered if the United States had over-interpreted a letter signed by former intelligence agents and others.
But both the reports on South Korea and Israel specifically cite “signals intelligence,” which refers to information derived from electronic signals such as communications systems. It is not clear whether the United States is surveilling the communications of Mossad leaders, but the leak suggests it is a possibility.
In South Korea, the suggestion that the communication of the National Security Council was intercepted also touched on domestic political scandals. Yoon made the unorthodox decision to move the presidential office out of its historic home, the Blue House, last year. Some opposition figures now suggest he has opened the office up to a greater risk of surveillance.
By tradition, there is no taboo against spying on friendly nations. Some nations, such as the Five Eyes alliance of Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and the United States, have essentially agreed not to spy on each other. However, overall there is no codified international agreement on the issue and few norms.
The changing nature of global communication, however, has made the issue much more pressing. Communication interception used to be such a mammoth task that resources would almost entirely point at major adversaries. Now, U.S. dominance of the global technology and digital communication market allows the possibility for an enormous amount of information gathering with minimal effort.
In 2013, data released by NSA whistleblower Snowden disclosed U.S. surveillance of the cellphone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the email account of Mexican President Felipe Calderón. Dozens of world leaders were later found to have been targeted.
The revelations prompted diplomatic anger. Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff canceled a trip to Washington after it was revealed her phone was being tracked, while the revelations about Merkel soured U.S.-Germany relations for years.
President Barack Obama did what you might expect after angering a friend: He apologized. He appeared on German television and told the nation that “as I am president of the United States, the chancellor of Germany will not have to worry about this.” But in the end, that appeared to be a personal pledge, rather than government policy.
So far, the global backlash about the recent document leak doesn’t match the one seen after the NSA leak. But there are still many more documents that have not yet been reported on, with more revelations that could create anger. And while the scale of the leak is smaller than other recent leaks, the detailed nature of the information released could be particularly damaging.
For Ukraine, there may be a reckoning. The leak of many documents about the condition of Ukraine’s military and its capabilities could force commanders to alter plans ahead of an already delayed counteroffensive. This could further damage relations between Kyiv and Washington, already tested after a year of fighting, at a pivotal moment.
Even some of the United States’ closest partners — those in the Five Eyes intelligence sharing club — have a reason for concern, despite not being directly spied on. The documents detail numerous examples of British activity around Ukraine, including an incident where a Russian fighter jet nearly shot down a U.K. surveillance plane last year — an event that the British government had only described in far vaguer terms.
Russia is relishing the situation. “The leaks are quite interesting,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters Monday, adding that it was already known that the United States spied on “various heads of state, especially in European capitals.”
The fact that the leak appeared to not be a malicious foreign act, but one from a man who just wanted to share them with his friends for fun, points to a more fundamental problem with the nation’s classified intelligence gathering: The United States is simply collecting too much information, and sharing it with too many people, for it all to remain secret.