After the leak came to light last week, senior US intelligence, State Department and Pentagon officials reached out to their counterparts to allay concerns about the release of the information, according to four officials from multiple countries. Members of the Five Eyes, an intelligence consortium of the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand, have asked Washington for more information but have not yet received substantial response. The requests were sent separately to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency and the US Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Meanwhile, officials in London, Brussels, Berlin, Dubai and Kiev have posed questions to Washington about how the information got online, who was responsible for the leak and what the United States is doing to suppress information from social networks. They also questioned whether the Biden administration was taking steps to limit the release of intelligence in the future. On Monday morning, White House officials told allies the administration was investigating and Washington was still trying to figure out the full extent of the leak, European officials said.
The scandal has plunged US relations with its allies into a state of crisis, raising the question of how Washington will rectify the situation. Officials around the world consider this data breach one of the biggest public intelligence failures since WikiLeaks leaked millions of confidential documents online from 2006 to 2021. Concerns about the leak are particularly problematic because most documents are related to the events in Ukraine, and these efforts, which, as Washington has repeatedly said, depend on cooperation between NATO allies, Europe and other countries, the publication notes.
“The method of the leak and its contents are highly unusual,” a former US intelligence analyst told the publication. “I can’t remember when there was such a volume leaked and such a wide range of reliable information on social media, and not like the Snowden Files, which first came through a group of journalists. ” The Pentagon, CIA, FBI declined to comment.
More than 100 US intelligence documents were posted on Discord, a secure messaging app, as of March 2 containing sensitive classified information. The photographed papers, which appeared to have been folded and then flattened, contained top secret information, including from the Central Intelligence Agency.
Read the latest news about science, technology, and innovations on The Eastern Herald .
