Is the Kremlin Involved in the Embarrassment to America’s Intelligence Community?

At first identified by the Washington Post only by his initials, OG, the leader of an internet group favoring “guns, military gear, and god,” is reported to be responsible for the Russia-favoring intelligence leaks that are rocking Washington, embarrassing the intelligence community, and damaging America’s relations with top allies. Is that the entire story, though?Not much is known yet about the leaker who was arrested Thursday and is expected to be arraigned tomorrow. The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times are reporting he is a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman, Jack Teixeira, who was based at Fort Bragg at the time of the leak. Yet, what was his motive?A well-reported Post piece says he shared the classified documents, slides, and other top-secret data online at Discord with a small online group of gaming enthusiasts, known as Thug Shaker Central, in order to impress its younger members, who knew each other only by their screen names.Somehow, one member or more violated the rule that what’s in the group stays there, sharing some material with another Discord group. From there, the stolen trove of intelligence gold migrated to more widely watched websites and became America’s, and the world’s, most talked-about scandal.The man known to the group as OG is “fit. He’s strong. He’s armed. He’s trained. Just about everything you can expect out of some sort of crazy movie,” the unnamed teenage group member who was the main source for the Post’s expose said. “He is not a Russian operative. He is not a Ukrainian operative,” he added. Yet, the leaked material that reached the press since the story emerged last week, at least, seems to track well with what the Kremlin would like to have told and heard. One can almost imagine a member of the mercenary Wagner Group or an FSB operative bragging to his superiors: “Look how I managed to make us look good. Look how I damaged America’s global relations.”Wagner and Russian intelligence members are using gaming communities like Discord “as a place to get information into circulation,” Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, told Semafor’s World Economy Summit on Wednesday, hours before the Post posted its bombshell OG story. Mr. Smith warned the Biden administration that Russians use gaming communities to “publish information and circulate it.”Russia, of course, has been Washington’s favorite punching bag for the last six years, and many allegations about its ability to influence American discourse turned out to be overly hyped and at times downright false. Yet, in this case it would be quite reasonable to suspect the Kremlin of involvement in one of the worst embarrassments to America’s intelligence community. Consider some of the most widely publicized stories emerging from the leak debacle. They detailed inadequacies in Ukraine’s air defenses. They undercounted, by a lot, Russian casualties in the war. They created discord between America and allies from Seoul to Jerusalem. One American ally, the United Arab Emirates, reportedly was considering spying on America and Britain on behalf of the FSB. Egypt, a country that receives $1 billion a year in American military aid, offered to manufacture 40,000 rockets for Russia’s war effort. South Korea’s presidential palace was wiretapped by American spooks. Britain’s Labour Party, according to one report, would be less belligerent toward Beijing if it gets in power. See a pattern here? It is perfectly possible that the leaker is merely a junior Air Force guardsman who somehow got access to top-secret documents and merely wanted to teach younger gaming enthusiasts about the ways of the world. As some of the group members lost focus while he patiently unscrambled military acronyms and other jargon, the man who identified himself as OG reportedly decided that rather than describing and transcribing things, he would show the group what the real documents look like. If so, though, why do almost all the expositions fit a certain narrative?It could well be that two things can be true at the same time. The story, as related to the Post by a teenager, fits a certain segment on the fringes of American society. The gun-toting, racist, anti-semitic “OG” could well be a mere braggadocio who wanted to show off. Then again, a Russian operative could have managed to infiltrate the group, taken favored nuggets from the documents he saw, and stealthily released them into the wider ether. The Sun has no inside knowledge on the purported leaker’s motives. Unlike the reported profile emerging from the group member’s account, he may be a foreign intelligence member who weaseled his way onto a military base and gained access to the most sensitive material. Or he may have, knowingly or not, been used by such a well-trained mole.Either way, the scandal is sure to reverberate further and continue to damage American interests even after the leaker is prosecuted and jailed.

Is the Kremlin Involved in the Embarrassment to America’s Intelligence Community?

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