Pentagon in full damage control mode as extent of intelligence leak unknown

‘WE DON’T KNOW’: The Pentagon was blindsided by the revelation last Thursday that highly classified documents, including briefing slides prepared for senior leaders, had popped up on social media sites Twitter and Telegram after languishing relatively unnoticed for weeks on Discord, a chatroom popular with gamers.

President Joe Biden and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin were both briefed about the massive intelligence breach for the first time the same day the New York Times broke the story, sending the Pentagon into five-alarm damage control mode.

“We don't know who's behind this. We don't know what the motive is … We don't know what else might be out there,” NSC spokesman John Kirby said at a White House briefing. “Is that a matter of concern to us? You're darn right it is.”

The leak involves more than 50, perhaps as many as 100, photographs of folded and wrinkled briefing slides from February and March, including some marked “Top Secret,” “SI-gamma,” for “signals intelligence,” and “NOFORN” for “no foreign nationals.”

“These photos appear to show documents similar in format to those used to provide daily updates to our senior leaders on Ukraine and Russia-related operations, as well as other intelligence updates. Some of these images appear to have been altered,” said Chris Meagher, assistant to the secretary of defense for public affairs in a conference call with reporters. “The Department of Defense is working around the clock to look at the scope and scale of the distribution, the assessed impact and our mitigation measures.”