JIM GERAGHTY
Roughly 1.3 million Americans have top-secret security clearance, and apparently one of them with a bottle of Gorilla Glue on their desk decided to take pictures of those documents. Read on.
A Whole Bunch of America’s Biggest Secrets, Revealed on the Internet
There are often harmful consequences when government agencies that deal with national security “stovepipe” intelligence — that is, keep it to themselves and don’t share it with other agencies. For the U.S. government to operate effectively when dealing with little-known or little-noticed threats or attempting to persuade or influence other governments, multiple government agencies need to know who’s doing what, where, and when, and coordinate their actions.
But when agencies don’t stovepipe sensitive or classified information, and, say, the Central Intelligence Agency shares a lot of what it knows with the Pentagon, they can end up with problems like the one currently wracking the highest levels of the U.S. government, as the Wall Street Journal lays out:
The intelligence leak is shaping up to be one of the most damaging in decades, officials said. The disclosure complicates Ukraine’s spring offensive. It will likely inhibit the readiness of foreign allies to share sensitive information with the U.S. government. And it potentially exposes America’s intelligence sources within Russia and other hostile nations.
This is really bad news. I don’t begrudge anyone for choosing to pay attention to other news stories, but this is a far-reaching and consequential development that will probably get less attention than it deserves, because it doesn’t involve Donald Trump, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or Ron DeSantis, or fit neatly into any partisan narrative.
The documents — really, photographs of classified documents — took an odd and circuitous route to the public’s eyes. Bellingcat, a Netherlands-based investigative-journalism group, lays out the sequence:
The existence of the documents was first reported by the New York Times after a number of Russian Telegram channels shared five photographed files relating to the invasion of Ukraine on April 5 — at least one of which has since been found by Bellingcat to be crudely edited.
These documents appeared to be dated to early March, around the time they were first posted online on Discord, a messaging platform popular with gamers. . . .
Bizarrely, the Discord channels in which the documents dated from March were posted focused on the Minecraft computer game and fandom for a Filipino YouTube celebrity. They then spread to other sites such as the imageboard 4Chan before appearing on Telegram, Twitter and then major media publishers around the world in recent days.
At some point, someone altered the images to make it appear that Russia was inflicting way more casualties upon Ukraine than the other way around. It is unclear whether this was the work of the original leaker, or someone later:
There was only one image in common between the Telegram and 4chan posts: a map that showed a number of statistics, including the cumulative number of KIA (killed in action) soldiers on the Russian and Ukrainian sides through the course of the war.
However, the numbers on these two sources differed, with the first source (4chan) showing more Russian losses than Ukrainian, and the second source (Donbass Devushka) the reverse.
A closer examination of the second image, with the much higher Ukrainian KIA numbers, that was posted on Telegram shows crude image manipulation.
As well as the later posting time and far blurrier resolution, the numbers are out of alignment. Spacing between some numbers and letters is also too large to be consistent with the font.
It therefore seems that either the Donbass Devushka Telegram account, or a previous source posted by this account, altered the original image to paint the Ukrainian losses as heavier than in the original assessment.
Who’s got Gorilla Glue on their desk? Apparently, that’s a weird clue about who took the pictures: “Creases can be seen on the documents with items, such as a hunter’s scope box and some Gorilla Glue visible in the background of those dated from early March. This appears to indicate that at least some of the documents were photographed in the same location.”
Every major news organization has found the documents and is picking through them for scoops. In the middle of last month, a grim account from Washington Post reporters Isabelle Khurshudyan, Paul Sonne, and Karen DeYoung described “a palpable, if mostly unspoken, pessimism from the front lines to the corridors of power in Kyiv, the capital.”
This morning, the Post reports that the intelligence further confirms this grim outlook, that the Ukrainians are facing “alarming shortfalls in Western-supplied weaponry — especially ammunition and air defense”:
According to one of the documents, a late February assessment from the Defense Department’s Joint Staff, Ukraine’s “ability to provide medium range air defense to protect the [front lines] will be completely reduced by May 23. UKR assessed to withstand 2-3 more wave strikes” from attacking Russian missiles and drones.
“As 1st Layer Defense munitions run out, 2nd and 3rd Layer expenditure rates will increase, reducing the ability to defend against Russian aerial attacks from all altitudes,” the classified document says.
Up across our northern border, the Globe and Mail reports that one of the documents indicates Russian hackers conducted a successful cyberattack on a Canadian natural-gas-pipeline company — but at least some Canadians are saying the attack never happened:
Hackers working with Russia’s spy agency claimed earlier this year to have disrupted operations at a Canadian natural-gas pipeline company, inflicting costly damage on its infrastructure, leaked Pentagon documents say.
The Globe and Mail has been unable to independently verify the allegations in the U.S. intelligence documents, the contents of which have also been reported by U.S. media.
There is no evidence to date that a natural-gas pipeline company in Canada suffered such an attack, which the Pentagon documents suggest occurred earlier this year.
Timothy Egan, president and chief executive of the Canadian Gas Association, which represents the natural-gas delivery industry, said he’s following the matter closely – after being contacted by an American journalist on the same documents. However, he said he is not aware of any compromised gas distribution infrastructure in this country or of an attack on it by hackers.
These documents may be entirely true, or they may be a mix of disinformation, misinformation, errors, rumors, and just plain mistakes.
Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that the documents reveal that the South Korea government was wary about shipping ammunition to the U.S., for fear that we would turn around and give the ammunition to Ukraine:
[President Yoon Suk Yeol’s] secretary for foreign affairs, Yi Mun-hui, told his boss, National Security Adviser Kim Sung-han, that the government “was mired in concerns that the U.S. would not be the end user if South Korea were to comply with a U.S. request for ammunition,” according to a batch of secret Pentagon documents leaked through social media.
The secret report was based on signals intelligence, which meant that the United States has been spying on one of its major allies in Asia.
I don’t think any U.S. ally should be that shocked that the NSA intercepts their internal communications, but this revelation is an embarrassment, nonetheless. After Edward Snowden revealed so many secrets about the NSA’s spying programs, a report indicated that the U.S. had tapped the cell phone of German chancellor Angela Merkel.* The U.S. government wants to know what allied leaders are really thinking and saying behind closed doors; it is reasonable to assume that our allies are attempting to do the same to our leaders.
Meanwhile, CNN reports that the documents indicate that the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, has been attempting to influence Israel’s own domestic politics:
An intelligence report about Israel, meanwhile, has sparked outrage in Jerusalem. The report, produced by the CIA and sourced to signals intelligence, says that Israel’s main intelligence agency, the Mossad, had been encouraging protests against the country’s new government – “including several explicit calls to action,” the report alleges.
The Israeli Prime Minister’s Office responded on the Mossad’s behalf Sunday morning, calling the report “mendacious and without any foundation whatsoever.”
“The Mossad and its senior officials did not — and do not — encourage agency personnel to join the demonstrations against the government, political demonstrations or any political activity,” the statement said. “The Mossad and its serving senior personnel have not engaged in the issue of the demonstrations at all and are dedicated to the value of service to the state that has guided the Mossad since its founding.”
Hey, now! Intelligence agencies are only supposed to meddle with and destabilize other countries’ governments, not their own!
A Feb. 28 document assesses “pathways” for Israel to provide “lethal aid” to Ukraine, providing hypothetical situations that might drive Israel from its balancing act between Kyiv and Moscow. Marked “secret,” the document also suggests what Israeli weapons could be transferred to Ukraine, such as Israel’s Javelin equivalent and other missile systems. The analysis says the “most plausible” scenario is that Jerusalem adopts a Turkish model under U.S. pressure. Like Ankara, it would mean that Israel “sells lethal defense systems or provides them through third-party entities” while openly advocating for peace and “offering to host mediation efforts.” Alternative scenarios consider how Moscow’s support of Iran’s military programs or proxy efforts in Syria could drive Israel to provide Ukraine with “lethal aid.”
The world knew that helping Ukraine repel the invading Russians was a high priority of the Biden administration. What we didn’t know was all the different ways that the U.S. was exerting pressure on allies to get them to send arms to Ukraine.
*Hey, when has a German chancellor ever created trouble for the United States, right?
A Serious Setback for Fox News in the Defamation Lawsuit
A few weeks ago, I interviewed Paul Clement, the former solicitor general under George W. Bush and the lawyer representing Fox News in the $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems Corporation and a similar $2.3 billion defamation lawsuit filed by Smartmatic.
Shortly before I left on vacation, Fox News received a setback in the case, as Delaware Superior Court judge Eric Davis rejected Fox News’ argument that statements at issue were opinion and thus protected by the First Amendment and not a basis for a defamation lawsuit. In an 81-page ruling, Davis laid out 19 examples where figures such as Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, Mike Lindell, Lou Dobbs, and others made statements on-air that asserted “facts and [were] therefore not protected under the opinion privilege.”
“The evidence does not support that [Fox News network] ‘conducted good-faith, disinterested reporting,” Judge Davis wrote. “Like in Cianci v. New Times Pub. Co., where the Second Circuit held that defendant’s failure to reveal facts and plaintiffs side of the story was not disinterested reporting, FNN’s failure to reveal extensive contradicting evidence from the public sphere and Dominion itself indicates its reporting was not disinterested.”
This is not the final ruling in the case, although this may increase pressure on Fox News to settle. The jury will be asked to consider whether the Fox News journalists, or the network as a whole, acted with actual malice — knowing falsity or reckless disregard for the truth — in broadcasting the claims, and whether damages are due.
ADDENDA: You know, if everybody who subscribed to the Morning Jolt newsletter subscribed to NRPlus, National Review would be on solid financial footing for a long time. Right now, a print-only subscription for one year is $24; a digital-only subscription for one year is $40; and the combination subscription for one year is just $52 — a dollar a week!
Last week, I snuck away from the beach to write two columns for that other Washington publication I write for, one about Brandon Johnson’s victory in the recent Chicago mayoral election and the other on how the Biden administration’s assurances about the Chinese spy balloon turned out to be false.
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