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US attorney general Merrick Garland announced on Thursday that 21-year old Jack Teixeira, a suspect in the recent leaks of US intelligence online, has been arrested.
The arrest was made “in connection with an investigation into an alleged unauthorised removal, retention and transmission of classified national defense information,” said Mr Garland.
“Teixeira is an employee of the United States Air Force National Guard. FBI agents took Teixeira into custody this afternoon without incident. He will have an initial appearance at the US District Court of the district of Massachusetts,” he said, adding that the investigation remains ongoing.
Investigators believe that the guardsman, who specialises in intelligence, led the online chat group where the documents were posted. FBI agents converged on his home on Thursday and heavily armed tactical agents took a man into custody outside the property.
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The revelation came soon after US president Joe Biden said on Thursday that US authorities were close to catching the leaker.
Speaking to reporters in Dublin, where he is on an official visit, Mr Biden said: “There’s a full-blown investigation going on, as you know, with the intelligence community and the justice department, and they’re getting close.”
“I’m not concerned about the leak,” Mr Biden said. “I’m concerned that it happened. But there’s nothing contemporaneous that I’m aware of that’s of great consequence.”
Some of the leaked documents are dated as recently as March, and discussed Ukraine’s troop deployments, military vulnerabilities and efforts to arm its forces before a spring counteroffensive. There is also evidence of US spying on allies, and their reluctance to arm Ukraine, and there is material about Russian forces and decision-making in Moscow that could help the Kremlin better understand the strengths and weaknesses of US intelligence collection efforts in Russia.
Some newly reported documents show knowledge of infighting between the Russian intelligence and the defence ministry. In one document reported by the New York Times, US officials describe how the Federal Security Service (FSB) had “accused the defence ministry of trying to cover up the extent of Russian casualties in Ukraine”.
Members of the group have told the investigative journalism organisation Bellingcat, the Washington Post and the New York Times that the documents were shared on Thug Shaker Central in an apparent attempt to impress the group, rather than to achieve any particular foreign policy outcome.
Starting months ago, one of the users uploaded hundreds of pages of intelligence briefings into the small chat group, lecturing its members, who had bonded during the isolation of the pandemic, on the importance of staying abreast of world events.
The New York Times spoke with four members of the Thug Shaker Central chat group, one of whom said he has known the person who leaked for at least three years, had met him in person, and referred to him as the OG. The friends described him as older than most of the group members, who were in their teens, and the undisputed leader. One of the friends said the OG had access to intelligence documents through his job.
While the gaming friends would not identify the group’s leader by name, a trail of digital evidence leads to Teixeira.
The New York Times has been able to link Teixeira to other members of the Thug Shaker Central group through his online gaming profile and other records. Details of the interior of Teixeira’s childhood home — posted on social media in family photographs — also match details on the margins of some of the photographs of the leaked secret documents.
Teixeira is enlisted in the 102nd Intelligence Wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard. Posts on the unit’s official Facebook page congratulated him and colleagues for being promoted to Airman 1st Class in July 2022.
It was not immediately clear if a young Air National Guardsman in his position could have had access to such highly sensitive briefings. Officials within the US government with security clearance often receive such documents through daily emails, one official told the Times, and those emails might then be automatically forwarded to other people.
Members of Thug Shaker Central said that the documents they discussed online were meant to be purely informative. While many pertained to the war in Ukraine, the members said they took no side in the conflict.
The documents, they said, only started to get wider attention when one of the teenage members of the group took a few dozen of them and posted them to a public online forum. From there they were picked up by Russian-language Telegram channels.
The person who leaked, they said, was no whistleblower, and the secret documents were never meant to leave their small corner of the internet.
“This guy was a Christian, anti-war, just wanted to inform some of his friends about what’s going on,” said one of the person’s friends from the community, a 17-year-old recent high school graduate. “We have some people in our group who are in Ukraine. We like fighting games, we like war games.”
The leaked documents have laid bare secrets about Ukraine’s preparations for a spring counter-offensive, US spying on allies such as Ukraine, South Korea and Israel, and the tensions between Washington and allied capitals over arming Kyiv. - New York Times/Guardian