Biden administration grappling with extent, motivation of intelligence leak

The details of the latest massive intelligence leak —printed papers, crude photographs and an online forum for gamers — is leaving the U.S. scrambling to sort out the source and motive behind the disclosure.

Department of Defense and Justice investigators face a complex saga to reverse engineer how at least 100 sensitive documents appear to have been printed, walked out of government facilities and then scattered across the internet.

“Where exactly and who had access at that point, we don’t know, we simply don’t know at this point,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters Tuesday. “I will tell you that we take this very seriously. And we will continue to investigate and turn over every rock until we find the source of this and the extent of it.”

The emerging facts around this intelligence crisis are important markers of how this leak compares to, and is different from other, watershed intelligence breaches.

“They are now conducting audits to see who printed out all those 100 documents,” Larry Pfeiffer, a former senior director of the White House Situation Room and chief of staff at the CIA, told The Hill.

“I’m hopeful that universe of people is going to be a manageable number. And then once they’ve got that manageable number, they can then begin to interview them….It does sound like a daunting task.”  

Narrowing down the list of potential suspects will help investigators figure out the scope of the leak and the motivation to distribute the documents and put them on the Internet.

“Is it ideological? Or is it just some guy who feels like he’s not being treated well, and ‘I’ll show everybody, I’ll put some stuff out there.’ Or, ‘I’m going to show everybody how cool I am on my video game platform. Look at this cool material I have,’”Pfeiffer said.

“There’s those classic four motivation areas: money, compromise, ego and ideology. It could fall into any one of those four baskets.”

Jamil Jaffer,who previously worked at the Justice Department’s National Security Division and as counsel to Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee, said hiding the information in plain sight may have been the best way for someone to hand off the information to another party.

“It could very well have been an American working as an intelligence asset for a foreign country and this was the dead drop,” Jaffer said. “You store it in a place on Discord and that’s where the handler goes to get it. This could be the online version of hiding documents under a rock or bridge in a park like Robert Hanssen used to in Northern Virginia.”

Other leakers behind major U.S. breaches have described themselves as whistleblowers.

This includes Reality Winner, who in 2017 transferred a classified report detailing Russian interference in the 2016 election to the press.

In 2013, Edward Snowden fled the U.S. with thousands of classified documents that he provided to selected journalists to expose the massive scope of American surveillance.  

Former U.S. Army private Chelsea Manning described her 2010 transfer of hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents to Julian Assange and Wikileaks as an act of opposition to the war in Iraq.

“The disclosure of actual materials is fairly unusual, or at least it used to be,” said Jaffer.

But he noted such leaks have begun to pick up pace.

“Since Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Vault Seven and now these documents, you wonder whether the moral feeling or the obligation we have for people with a security clearance is starting to decay at some level, at least for some people. There’s a larger problem here.”

The increasing frequency of the leaks is leading some watching the crisis unfold to question why such closely guarded documents are even able to be printed.

“I’ve got to tell you the first thing I thought was, ‘God darn it, get rid of printers. We don’t need printers anymore!”Pfeiffer said, noting how easily the material is carried out in pants pockets.

“They’re not frisking every human being that goes in and out of these secure facilities, that would just be impossible. But you begin to wonder, how much printing do we really need to do or should printing be even a more controlled activity?”

Evelyn Farkas, executive director of the McCain Institute and a former top Pentagon official, said whoever is behind the recent leak would have had to sidestep several layers of security protocol to share the information. 

“When I would go into the Pentagon, I would put my cell phone into a box, and then I would go into my inner office” where classified, confidential and secret materials could be reviewed, Farkas said. Top secret materials, when being reviewed, would have to be retrieved from and put back in a locked safe, she added. 

“And I mean, I suppose I could go out to my outer office, get my phone and bring it in and break the law,” she said, speculating on the activities of the leaker. “That’s hardcore espionage. That’s just, wow.” 

U.S. agencies have made clear the next steps involve both identifying those responsible as well as holding them to account.

“Obviously our number one goal is to stop it,” House Intelligence Chair Michael Turner (R-Ohio) said during a Monday interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper.

“Two is to do damage control, how do we have to adjust as a result of these documents becoming public? And thirdly, finding out who it is, certainly if it’s an American bringing them to justice because this obviously is espionage and would write rise to the level of being a traitor to your country.

“The Department of Justice is going to be doing an excellent job in tracking down exactly who is responsible for this.”