Why would a 21-year-old national guardsman be in a position with access to top secret documents to begin with?
The dramatic arrest on Thursday of Jack Teixeira, an airman in an intelligence unit in the Massachusetts Air National Guard who federal authorities believe is linked to a leak of reams of classified documents, lays bare the sheer volume of people who have clearance to view a swath of national security documents that the government categorizes as top secret.
From National Guard members on bases in Massachusetts to generals at NATO headquarters in Brussels to American bureaucrats all over the world, the “top secret” level of clearance gives bearers an extraordinary level of access. With it, they can see secure Pentagon and other intelligence sites, daily intelligence briefings, situation maps and detailed analyses of the state of the world as seen through the eyes of the American intelligence community.
American service members with top-secret clearance include nearly all of the more than 600 or so generals in the various services. But that level of clearance also extends to some of their military aides, many colonels who work in the Pentagon, captains of Navy ships, a wide array of junior officers, and even, in the apparent case of Airman Teixeira, enlisted service members working in intelligence units.
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