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The posting on social media of what appears to be several highly classified U.S. intelligence documents might be just the beginning of what could turn out to be the most serious U.S. intelligence breach in more than a decade.
After last week’s seeming leak, an ABC News review found dozens more top-secret documents posted in early March in a hard-to-find corner of the internet shortly after the documents were drafted.
The content of those additional documents appears to be U.S. intelligence about the war in Ukraine and in other parts of the world. And the disclosure has raised diplomatic issues as it appears that U.S. intelligence has been spying not only on its adversaries, but on allies and partners.
The apparent leak has triggered a criminal investigation by the Justice Department that will try to find out who posted the documents on the internet and why.
Here’s what you need to know about what happened and what the documents contain.What are the leaked documents?
What has been posted on the internet are dozens of photographs of printouts of what appear to be highly classified documents that show creases from having been folded.
ABC News has been able to review 38 of these apparently classified U.S. intelligence documents drafted in late February and on March 1 and March 2.
The documents are a mix of tactical statistics and maps of the battlefield in Ukraine apparently drafted by the Pentagon’s Joint Staff. Others appear to be more strategic-level U.S. intelligence analyses that touch on Ukraine’s fight with Russia and other regions of the world that seem to have been put together by the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies.
Almost all of the 38 documents are classified as top secret and contain specific information about whether they can be shared with foreign partners. They also include how the information was obtained, including signals intercepts.
More than a dozen documents apparently prepared by the Joint Staff describe the military situation in Ukraine on March 1 especially around the battlefields of Bakhmut, Kharkiv and the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine.
They contain many statistics about Ukrainian troop levels, the training of Ukrainian forces, equipment provided to Ukraine by the U.S. and other countries and casualty numbers. One of these documents posted on social media last week was apparently altered from the previous version posted in early March to reflect lower fatality numbers for Russian forces.
The bulk of the remaining documents appear to have been produced by U.S. intelligence and are presented in paragraph form. They describe specific analytical intelligence for other parts of the world and include intelligence gathered from both adversaries and friendly nations.
There is also what appears to be a two-page CIA document summarizing the major intelligence analysis for March 2.Who had access?
It is unclear how many U.S. government officials would have had access to any of the documents since they were not limited to only military personnel or those working only on issues related to Ukraine.
Because of their content, the documents, apparently produced by the Joint Staff, would presumably have been made available to hundreds of U.S. military personnel or U.S. officials involved in the situation in Ukraine, not just at the Pentagon but in other U.S. government departments as well.
But they would not be limited to just those officials — so those with access could conceivably include hundreds and possibly thousands of U.
