Usa, Wp: “Pentagon document leak identified”
The person responsible for the leak of hundreds of classified Pentagon documents may be a young racist gun enthusiast who worked at a military base and was trying to impress an Internet chat group with his revelations.
The Washington Post interviewed a teenage member of the group, who described the man, referred to by the initials “OG”, showing online correspondence, photographs and videos. The Post also saw a video of the man at a shooting range with a large rifle, “yelling a series of racial and anti-Semitic slurs at the camera, then firing several shots at a target.”
The leaked documents exposed secrets about Ukraine’s preparations for a spring counteroffensive, US spying on allies such as Ukraine, South Korea and Israel, and tensions between Washington and allied capitals over arming Kiev.
There is mounting evidence that the leak was not an intelligence operation aimed at discrediting the United States, but more likely the consequence of a Pentagon policy of granting top secret security clearances to huge numbers of service members. civilians and contractors.
The number of employees and contractors in the entire US government with top secret clearance is approximately 1.25 million. OG appears to have been operating on a server originally created in 2020 on the messaging platform Discord by a small group of gun enthusiasts and gamers. The group went by several names, but most often they were known as Thug Shaker Central.
As of last year, OG is said to have posted the documents to a channel on the server it called “Bear vs Pig,” a reference to the war in Ukraine but also a viral video showing pigs fighting a black bear.