Status: 04/13/2023 3:42 p.m
The release of US secret documents on the Ukraine war continues to cause unrest. Perhaps the person responsible has now been found. According to a report by the Washington Post, it is an employee of a US military base.
According to research by the “Washington Post”, the US secret documents that have appeared on the Internet are said to have been published by an employee of a military base in the USA. As the newspaper reports, she learned from two members of a group on the online platform Discord that the young man had placed hundreds of pages of secret government documents on this platform.
The man told them he brought the papers home with him from his job at the military base. The explosive documents were initially shared by him as transcripts in a chat group he led on the platform popular with video gamers, the report said.
“Bad opinion of the US government”
The man, nicknamed “OG,” posted the documents for months on the Discord group, which has around 24 members, including people from Russia and Ukraine. Their common interest, according to the Washington Post, is their “love of guns, military equipment and God.” According to the newspaper, the man has a “bad opinion of the government” in Washington. A group member said OG had labeled the United States, and particularly law enforcement and intelligence agencies, as a “dark force” trying to oppress citizens and “keep them in the dark.”
He is said to have reported to group members that he “toiled for hours” to copy the confidential documents and then shared them with the members of the Discord group. To make his work easier, he later began photographing the documents and then sharing them.
Didn’t mean to be a whistleblower
The Washington Post quoted one of the Discord users as saying that “OG” had instructed the group members not to distribute the documents themselves. He also said that he did not want to be a so-called whistleblower.
Secret documents from US agencies on the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine have been circulating on the Internet for weeks. Shortly before Easter, US media reported for the first time on the leak of this sensitive material on both warring parties without publishing the documents themselves. An intensive search was then carried out for the person who published these documents.
Maybe also a wrong track
However, the “Washington Post” also drew attention to another point: the narrative surrounding Discord could also be the maneuver of a sophisticated opponent to steer investigators down the wrong track, the paper wrote, citing former defense officials.
The news portal “Politico” raised the question of how it could be that the responsible US authorities only became aware of the secret papers that had been circulating for months in April – when there were first media reports about it. “This suggests that there may be a large online blind spot in gathering intelligence information in the United States,” the news portal writes.
Informants do not want to reveal identity
The investigators could possibly learn more from the two chat group users with whom the “Washington Post” spoke. But they made it clear, according to the newspaper, that while they know the real identity of “OG” and the state where he lives, they are not willing to divulge this information. After all, they are like family.
In mid-March, “OG” stopped sharing documents with the chat group, the newspaper reported. The reason was that someone from the district posted documents in another group at the end of February and thus broke the secrecy requirement. In early April, just before the New York Times reported the leak, OG seemed desperate. “He said something happened and he prays to God that this event doesn’t happen,” one of the two interviewed members is quoted as saying. It was a minor whose mother had to give the newspaper her permission.