US intel leak: How the latest documents are different from past breaches

NEW YORK - When WikiLeaks spilt a huge trove of US State Department cables 13 years ago, it gave the world a sense of what American diplomats do each day – the sharp elbows, the doubts about wavering allies and the glimpses at how Washington was preparing for North Korea’s eventual collapse and Iran’s nuclear breakout.

When Edward Snowden swept up the National Security Agency’s secrets three years later, Americans suddenly discovered the scope of how the digital age had ushered in a remarkable new era of surveillance by the agency – enabling it to pierce China’s telecommunications industry and to drill into Google’s servers overseas to pick up foreign communications.

The cache of 100 or so newly leaked briefing slides

of operational data on the war in Ukraine is distinctly different.

The data revealed so far is less comprehensive than those vast secret archives, but far more timely. And it is the immediate salience of the intelligence that most worries White House and Pentagon officials.

Some of the most sensitive material – maps of Ukrainian air defences and a deep dive into South Korea’s secret plans to deliver 330,000 rounds of much-needed ammunition in time for Ukraine’s spring counter-offensive – is revealed in documents that appear to be barely 40 days old.

It is the freshness of the “secret” and “top secret” documents, and the hints they hold for operations to come, that make these disclosures particularly damaging, administration officials say.

The 100-plus pages of slides and briefing documents leave no doubt about how deeply enmeshed the United States is in the day-to-day conduct of the war, providing the precise intelligence and logistics that help explain Ukraine’s success thus far.

While President Joe Biden has barred US troops from firing directly on Russian targets, and blocked sending weapons that could reach deep into Russian territory, the documents make clear that a year into the invasion, the US is heavily entangled in almost everything else.

It is providing detailed targeting data and coordinating the long, complex logistical train that delivers weapons to the Ukrainians.

And as a Feb 22 document makes clear, US officials are planning ahead for a year in which the battle for the Donbas is “likely heading towards a stalemate” that will frustrate Russian President Vladimir Putin’s goal of capturing the region – and Ukraine’s goal of expelling the invaders.

One senior Western intelligence official summed up the disclosures as “a nightmare”.

Mr Dmitri Alperovitch, the Russia-born chair of Silverado Policy Accelerator, who is best known for pioneering work in cyber security, said on Sunday that he feared there were “a number of ways this can be damaging”.

He said that included the possibility that Russian intelligence is able to use the pages, spread out over Twitter and Telegram, “to figure out how we are collecting” the plans of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service, and the movement of military units.

In fact, the documents released so far are a brief snapshot of how the United States views the war in Ukraine.

Many pages seem to come right out of the briefing books circulating among the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and in a few cases updates from the US Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) operations centre.

They are a combination of the current order of battle and – perhaps most valuable to Russian military planners – US projections of where the air defences being rushed into Ukraine could be located next month.

Mixed in are a series of early warnings about how Russia might retaliate, beyond Ukraine, if the war drags on.

One particularly ominous CIA document refers to a pro-Russian hacking group that had successfully broken into Canada’s gas distribution network and was “receiving instructions from a presumed Federal Security Service officer to maintain network access to Canadian gas infrastructure and wait for further instruction”.

So far, there is no evidence that Russian actors have begun a destructive attack, but that was the explicit fear expressed in the document.

Because such warnings are so sensitive, many of the “top secret” documents are limited to American officials or to the “Five Eyes” – the intelligence alliance of the US, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

That group has an informal agreement not to spy on the other members. But it clearly does not apply to other American allies and partners.

There is evidence that the US has plugged itself into Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s internal conversations and those of even the closest US allies, such as South Korea.

In a dispatch very reminiscent of the 2010 WikiLeaks disclosures, one document based on what is delicately referred to as “signals intelligence” describes the internal debate in South Korea over how to handle American pressure to send more lethal aid to Ukraine, which would violate the country’s practice of not directly sending weapons into a war zone.

It reports that South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol was concerned that Mr Biden might call him to press for greater contributions to Ukraine’s military.

It is an enormously sensitive subject among South Korean officials.

During a recent visit to Seoul, the South Korean capital, before the leaked documents appeared, government officials dodged a reporter’s questions about whether they were planning to send 155mm artillery rounds, which they produce in large quantities, to aid in the war effort.

One official said South Korea did not want to violate its own policies, or risk its delicate relationship with Russia.

Now the world has seen the Pentagon’s “delivery timeline” for sea shipments of those shells, along with estimates of the cost of the shipments – US$26 million (S$34.5 million). NYTIMES