The 21 Year Old Leaker — Something Is NOt Right
14 April 2023 by Larry Johnson 42 Comments
The media obsession in vilifying Jack Texeira for “leaking” TOP SECRET and SECRET documents and judging him guilty without any benefit of doubt, is just another symptom of the authoritarian fever that grips many inhabitants of the United States. Forget the first amendment. Stay in the dark and trust the Government to tell you what you need to know. Before you join the mob eager to lynch the poor kid, let me share what some of my friends who are veterans of the CIA and the Air Force have said about this affair in the past few days.
Both men say that the story and alleged facts smell to high heaven. One longtime buddy, a veteran of the CIA, still provides consulting services to the U.S. Government and holds the same high clearances that he had prior to his retirement. He is an experienced operations officer. He has recruited foreigners to spy on behalf of the United States, managed highly classified programs and planned and executed many covert actions. In other words, he is no desk jockey.
We started working together 18 years ago in providing training support to a variety of military commands by writing and executing military exercises. All of our work was conducted in a SCIF and we had the clearances that gave us access to TOP SECRET, COMPARTMENTED INTELLIGENCE. I stopped doing that work five years ago but he has continued on.
During our 18 years of working on these highly classified exercises we have never seen a E3 (i.e., an Airman First Class) anywhere in the SCIF. The enlisted personnel who worked on these TOP SECRET exercises were at least a Staff Sergeant (E5). So what is a lowly E3 doing in a SCIF with TOP SECRET material and no supervision? That is the first red flag.
Another red flag, as I noted in my previous piece, is the partial copy of the CIA Operations Center Intelligence Report. Both of us have had access to CIA systems available on the military servers and we have never seen the CIA Ops Center report on any of those systems. Never! How did this 21 year old kid get his hands on that?
I was chatting today with another friend. He’s of more recent vintage. I discovered he is a retired U.S. Air Force Colonel and that his last job with the Air Force was the inspection, certification and monitoring of Air Force SCIFs. Wow! Talk about serendipity. I asked him what he thought of the story the media is hard selling about the 21 year old with a trove of TS leaked documents? He told me, “It does not make sense.”.
He made the same points as my CIA buddy — how does a 21 year old E3 have this kind of access? My retired Colonel never saw it during his career. He told me, “At most, kids this age, might have a SECRET clearance.”
He also made the same observation that I raised in my previous piece on this incident — where the hell was this airman’s chain of command? A lowly E3 is not going to have unfettered access to a SCIF and will always have at least one senior commander (NCO or Officer) present to tell him what to do and to monitor his work.
Something is askew with the media story being presented to the World about the boy who posted the leak on the gamer chat board. The documents are not randomly selected. If the intent was to post classified information in order to impress a bunch of teenage gamers then why is the bulk of the material only about the war in Ukraine?
Finally, we are told, according to the Washington Post, that there are 300 documents. Really? Where are they? I have only been able to find roughly 18 documents. Have any of your seen the 100 pages that the media insists were posted to the web? That discrepancy alone raises another big red flag for me. Why was the Washington Post allowed to read/see 300 highly classified documents? The Post reporters do not hold security clearances. But it is okay for them to review those documents.
One of the major revelations from this leaking incident is that most of the press in the United States have rejected the fundamental mission of the media — expose truths the Government wants to hide from the public. What a volte face!! Fifty years ago the New York Times and the Washington Post led the way in defying the Nixon Adminstration’s effort to quash the publication of the highly classified Pentagon Papers. Those documents revealed that the U.S. Government, under both Republican and Democrat Presidents, lied to the American public about the war in Vietnam. And today? Those two media outlets enthusiastically helping the U.S. Government identify the leaker and smear him in the process. So much for the viability of the First Amendment.