Pentagon leak: How secret US files spread then vanished online

On April 5, screenshots of the documents appeared on the message board 4chan.

In Summary
  • Some of these files were then shared on a public chat group, the earliest of these we've been able to identify appeared on 1 March.
  • More were placed there over the following days, and later shared more widely on other channels.
Pentagon officials have been quoted as saying the leaked documents are real
Pentagon officials have been quoted as saying the leaked documents are real

The suspected leaker of a large batch of US military documents, Jack Teixeira, has been charged in a Boston court and detained pending trial, but where did the classified files come from and how were they shared online?

We've pieced together what we know about how they first appeared, where they spread, and who's been discussing them.

First appearance of documents

The documents were initially posted on a small private chat group called "Bear vs Pig". This was itself a sub-group of another known as "Thug Shaker Central" on the Discord social media platform. Both were accessible by invitation-only and had around two dozen members.

Some of these files were then shared on a public chat group, the earliest of these we've been able to identify appeared on 1 March.

More were placed there over the following days, and later shared more widely on other channels.

These channels aren't about politics or military intelligence, they're for players of the computer game Minecraft and another for fans of a Filipino YouTube celebrity.

In one of the channels, after a brief argument about Minecraft and the war in Ukraine, a user says "here, have some leaked documents" and posts several screenshots.

The investigative website Bellingcat has seen evidence that some documents could have been posted in January or even earlier.

Who was in the initial chat group?

Members of the Thug Shaker Central chat, which has now been deleted, say they had initially met in another Discord group dedicated to fans of a YouTuber who posts videos about guns and military gear.

In interviews with the Washington Post and New York Times, these members say that during the Covid lockdowns, they broke away to form their own private group and that Jack Teixiera, the man suspected of being responsible for the leaks, was the driving force in this new close-knit community.

Members of group say it not only contained US citizens but also others from Ukraine, Russia, South America and elsewhere around the world.

From October last year, Mr Teixeira began posting lengthy summaries of some of the classified files into the private group. He later started sharing photographs of the actual documents.

For a few months these documents remained private to this group.

Spread across social media

One of the members of this small community then shared the documents more widely.

Attention has focused on an individual with the user name "Lucca" who posted some of them on the publicly accessible Minecraft gaming Discord channel in early March.

This same user was also a member of the Thug Shaker Central community, according to the New York Times.

On 5 April, screenshots of the documents then appeared on the message board 4chan, one of the biggest and most controversial hubs of internet subculture.

They were shared on one of 4chan's most notorious boards known as /pol/ - standing for politically incorrect - by anonymous users during an argument about the exact number of Ukrainian and Russian casualties there had been in the conflict.

Just a few hours later, these documents began appearing on pro-Kremlin Telegram channels and were also picked up by prominent military bloggers.

One image - widely circulated by Russian channels - was edited to reduce the number of Russian troops killed and inflate the Ukrainian losses.

By 7 April, the documents were also circulating on some of the major social media platforms, such as Twitter and Reddit.

Russian response

Initially, pro-Kremlin Telegram channels who shared the screenshots did not dwell much on the authenticity of the documents, focusing largely on their content.

But soon several prominent channels and media outlets started to lean towards portraying the documents as at least partly fake.

An expert quoted by ultranationalist news website Regnum suggested the documents may be a deliberate leak aimed at providing a smokescreen for the coming Ukrainian counter-offensive.

On state TV, Yuri Podolyaka, a prominent war commentator, said this was "planted information" intended to mislead Russia about the counter-offensive.

Olga Skabeyeva, host of state Rossiya 1 TV's 60 Minutes talk show said the West had been doing "all it can to create the image of a weak Ukraine whose shells are running out and which has nothing left at all".

Questions about the authenticity of the documents have been raised in Ukraine too, with some commentators accusing Russia of planting fake documents ahead of the Ukrainian counter-offensive.

Disappearing documents

Multiple screenshots of the documents - often of poor quality - are still circulating on Twitter, Telegram and Reddit.

But the originals are much harder to find. A lot of the original copies have now disappeared from the chats where they first emerged.

Others who shared the screenshots on Discord, Telegram and Twitter have either wiped out their feeds or deleted their social media profiles altogether.

And there's a great deal of paranoia too.

One user who has previously shared screenshots of the documents on Discord told fellow users they'd been trying to get rid of all the copies they had on their phone.

Another was quick to respond to a plea to share more documents on the forum with: "Nice try FBI".

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