US assessing impact of highly-classified documents leak on national security, allies: Pentagon
The United States Defense Department says the country is assessing the impact of the recent online leak of highly-classified military and intelligence documents on the country's national security and its close allies.
The leak features dozens of photographed documents that have been surfacing on Twitter, Telegram, Discord and other social media platforms over recent days, American media outlets reported on Sunday, saying new documents continued to surface online.
"An interagency effort has been stood up, focused on assessing the impact these photographed documents could have on US national security and on our allies and partners," said Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh.
The documents reportedly feature assessments and secret intelligence reports, including but not exclusively restricted to data on Russia-Ukraine war as well as highly sensitive analyses of other US key allies, including Israel and South Korea.
They "appear to contain sensitive and highly-classified material," Singh said of the documents, some of whose data apparently concern the Israeli regime's Mossad spy agency.
The Pentagon is still reviewing the authenticity of the documents, but, according to American officials' comments on the matter to The Washington Post, many of the documents are consistent with CIA World Intelligence Review reports. Those reports are shared at high levels within the White House, Pentagon, and State Department.
American officials are, meanwhile, busy searching for the source of the leaks. Some said the breadth of topics that have been addressed in the documents suggests they might have been leaked by an American rather than an ally.
One of the officials who spoke to Reuters on the condition of anonymity, said investigators were looking at four or five theories, from a disgruntled employee to an insider threat that actively wanted to undermine US national security interests.
"The focus now is on this being a US leak, as many of the documents were only in US hands," Michael Mulroy, a former senior Pentagon official, told Reuters in an interview.
The data leak has been rated as one of the most serious security breaches since more than 700,000 documents, videos, and diplomatic cables appeared on the WikiLeaks whistleblower website in 2013.
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