Pentagon headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, this Thursday. TOM BRENNER (Portal)
As the Pentagon works to apply the damage control strategy, the US Department of Justice has launched an investigation into leaks of military and intelligence documents online, largely related to the war in Ukraine. The leak’s derivatives multiply, putting Ukraine even more against Russia and vice versa, in addition to exposing vulnerabilities and debates within US-allied countries. One of the closest, Israel, has also been alluded to for exposing the alleged role of the foreign espionage service Mossad in driving protests against the government of Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial reform. Relations between the US and Israel have been in one of their most tense periods for weeks.
Since the leak became known last Friday, the revelations have followed one another. The umpteenth has to do with a possible attack by a group of Russian hackers on Canada’s energy infrastructure, on which US supplies partly depend. in its Russian acronym; heir to the KGB) may have compromised the IP address of a Canadian gas pipeline network and damaged its infrastructure in February, according to leaked Pentagon documents.
The leaks contain forecasts about the course of the war in Ukraine and the actual capacity of the two opposing armies, neither of which are very rosy; Combat plans ahead of a supposed spring offensive, but also top-secret intelligence reports involving US allies that have been leaked since last month on Twitter, Telegram (a messaging service popular in Russia like WhatsApp), Discord, 4Chan and other social networks. It is one of the most serious since WikiLeaks released more than 700,000 diplomatic cables in 2013.
The Pentagon said Friday it was “actively reviewing the matter” and had referred the case to the Justice Department, so the investigation is still in its early stages. US officials told the Washington Post that some documents had been tampered with, suggesting likely Russian authorship, but many others concurred with reports from the CIA’s World Intelligence Review, which was commissioned at the highest level by the White House, the Pentagon and the US State Department were shared.
Defense analysts say such a leak favors Moscow’s history and propaganda by demonstrating the extent to which US intelligence has managed to penetrate Russia’s military apparatus, according to local media. Other documents, confirmed in principle by federal investigators, provide information about the internal debate in US-allied governments like South Korea, which the New York Times says are under pressure from the US to supply artillery shells to Ukraine.
One of the US’s key allies, Israel, has also been caught up in the rebellions at a time of marked internal and external instability. Mossad (foreign espionage) has released the information contained in one of the documents, marked Top Secret and updated March 1, which accuses the agency of facilitating protests against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his controversial judicial reform, which now on hold, categorically denied. The mobilization, which has seen tens of thousands of Israelis take to the streets over the past three months, has provoked tensions within the government and criticism from institutions such as the country’s presidency and army.
Subscribe to EL PAÍS to follow all the news and read without limits.
subscribe to
Good relationship with Putin
Prime Minister Netanyahu’s office was forced this Sunday to speak out in the face of the information, flatly denying any involvement by Mossad agents in the mobilizations against his government’s plans. However, the denial adds fuel to the fire of differences between the two allies, especially after President Joe Biden criticized Netanyahu-led judicial reform. Another of the released documents points to Washington’s pressure on the Israeli government to supply lethal weapons to Ukraine, contrary to the Jewish state’s current policies, and the risk of disrupting Netanyahu’s balance with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The leak of the Pentagon papers, which are still in their infancy, is already a thunderbolt. The details of the military and espionage plans are so detailed, like Ukraine’s air defenses or the weak flanks of the Ukrainian and Russian armies, that experts believe they were leaked by an American and not an ally. Other issues reflected in the documents also relate to China, the Middle East and Africa. “The attention [de los investigadores] It indicates that this is a US leak as many of the documents were only in US hands,” Michael Mulroy, a former senior Pentagon official, told Portal.
Most troubling about the course of the Ukrainian war are military intelligence reports that estimates of battlefield casualties appear to have been rigged to minimize Russian casualties. One of these documents is not secret, although it contains top secret information. Some files are marked as NOFORN, which means they cannot be delivered to foreigners. Another filing, dated February 23, marked classified, describes how Ukraine’s S-300 air defense systems would be depleted by May 2 at the current usage rate.
Follow all international information on Facebook and Twitteror in our weekly newsletter.