Leaker of Pentagon documents says he worked on military base: Report

ANKARA

The person behind the leaking of the classified US military documents claims to be an employee of a military base, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.

The leaker is a young man, a “charismatic gun enthusiast” who shared the documents with an invite-only group of about two dozen mostly men and boys who first gathered on Discord, an online gamers’ hangout, in 2020 during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, said the paper.

The man some call “OG” started posting transcriptions of classified military documents, saying he got them from an unnamed military base, along with explanations of some of the insider acronyms and terms.

OG said that at the base, he spent time “inside a secure facility … which could be used to document the secret information housed on government computer networks or spooling out from printers,” according to a member of the Discord group.

The documents he posted covered sensitive subjects such as “top-secret reports about the whereabouts and movements of high-ranking political leaders and tactical updates on military forces,” even reports on foreign governments trying to interfere with elections, said the member.

When it grew too difficult to transcribe the documents by hand, OG began posting hundreds of photos of documents instead.

The Post also described a video said to be of OG using racist and antisemitic slurs before firing a rifle at a target.

'Serious risk'

Though the classified documents were posted months ago, their significance only recently became clear.

While the documents that emerged on April 7 mainly contain details about the Ukraine-Russia war, posts from over the weekend also include US intelligence activities in the war, the US monitoring of Iran and China, and the listening of the talks of some allies.

The Biden administration has repeatedly declined to confirm or deny the authenticity of the documents even as they have sent shockwaves through some of the US' most important international relationships.

The Justice Department and Pentagon have opened investigations into how the cache was released without authorization and who might have been responsible.

Many are crudely taken photos of documents with markings bearing varying levels of classification and appear to be folded, according to images circulating on social media. Some carry seals of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Many of the documents date back to March and relate to the war in Ukraine, including force and casualty levels for Kyiv and Moscow's militaries. Others paint a dire picture of Ukraine's ammunition levels ahead of an expected counter-offensive to further roll back Russia's occupation.

The Pentagon has maintained the documents pose "a very serious risk" to US national security and "have the potential to spread disinformation."

*Writing by Gozde Bayar