New Delhi: A top Pentagon spokesman said on Monday that the online leak of highly classified documents about the Ukraine war posed an “extremely serious” threat to national security and senior leaders were moving swiftly to minimize the damage. are taking steps. Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Chris Meagher told reporters that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin first learned on Thursday that several classified briefing slides detailing US military efforts in the Ukraine war and intelligence related to other countries were leaked. Are. In the days since Austin was notified, he has reached out to colleagues, holds daily meetings to assess the damage and established a group to not only assess the scope of information lost but review Who has access to those briefings.
The department is closely watching ‘how and to whom this type of information is distributed,’ Meagher said, but would not say who can access it, adding that steps have already been taken to tighten controls .
At the State Department, spokesman Vedant Patel told reporters that US officials are in dialogue with allies and partners at the highest level, assuring them of our commitment to protecting intelligence and our loyalty to safeguarding our partnership. is included.
He and Meagher declined to provide specifics about the extension of the release, including how it came about and which countries’ leaders the US has spoken to. Patel said there was ‘no question’ that the release of the documents presented a risk to national security.
Investigators tracking social media, including journalism organization Bellingcat, say the documents may have circulated for months in private Internet chats on the Discord discussion forum.
When asked whether the Pentagon contacted Discord, Meagher referred questions to the Justice Department, which has opened a criminal investigation into the leak.
The slides, which were eventually distributed to more mainstream sites such as Twitter, detail the US training and equipment program to support Ukraine, damage assessments, what monitoring the US is doing on key allies and strategic partners, and what Russia is doing. is picking up those relationships.
While the Pentagon has been careful not to quantify the information contained in any specific documents, overall “they present a very serious risk to national security and have the potential to spread disinformation,” Meagher said. “We are being very careful and watching where this is being posted and amplified.”
The documents are labeled secret and top secret and in some cases are classified as U.S.