Global Courant 2023-04-14 09:04:17
Folks inside the Beltway are crediting a Johns Hopkins University lecturer on foreign policy, Charlie Stevenson, with memorably identifying in his newsletter a new type of source for leaked documents: “the showoff who wants to demonstrate his inside knowledge.”
The category may not be brand new – it may explain the motivation behind Donald Trump’s hoarding of classified papers, currently the subject of a US Justice Department investigation.
But Stevenson’s quick description may fit Jack Teixeira, who the FBI arrested Thursday on suspicion he had revealed highly classified Pentagon documents on videogamers’ site Discord – a site that, the Washington Post reports, the 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guard enlisted man ran for the entertainment of a group of worshipful teenagers.
That said, it’s also important to bear in mind – in the current epidemic of leaked secrets, many of them relating to the Ukraine war – that the older categories of leakers have not gone away.
Paraphrasing Stevenson, Slate’s Fred Kaplan writes: “In the past, most leaks on US foreign policy have come from three sources: administration officials launching trial balloons; losers of interagency fights, who want to rally fellow critics; and whistleblowers, seeking to expose terrible activities.”
The second of those older categories, in particular, seems most likely to apply to the as-yet-unidentified person who has fed independent investigative reporter Seymour Hersh the details of a purportedly US-led operation in which three of the four Nord Stream gas pipelines connecting Russia and Germany were blown up last September.
The alleged purpose of the bombing was to deprive Vladimir Putin of the power to use Russian gas exports to blackmail Germany into abandoning its support for Ukraine. Let’s examine the Washington Post account and Hersh’s accounts for a comparison of these two cases.
WaPo on Teixeira
“The man behind a massive leak of US government secrets that has exposed spying on allies, revealed the grim prospects for Ukraine’s war with Russia and ignited diplomatic fires for the White House is a young, charismatic gun enthusiast who shared highly classified documents with a group of far-flung acquaintances searching for companionship amid the isolation of the pandemic.”
Jack Teixeira. Photo: SkyNews / Screengrab
Thus begins the Post article about a man originally identified only as OG. It continues:
United by their mutual love of guns, military gear and God, the group of roughly two dozen — mostly men and boys — formed an invitation-only clubhouse in 2020 on Discord, an online platform popular with gamers. But they paid little attention last year when the man some call “OG” posted a message laden with strange acronyms and jargon. The words were unfamiliar, and few people read the long note, one of the members explained. But he revered OG, the elder leader of their tiny tribe, who claimed to know secrets that the government withheld from ordinary people….
The gathering spot had been a pandemic refuge, particularly for teen gamers locked in their houses and cut off from their real-world friends. The members swapped memes, offensive jokes and idle chitchat. They watched movies together, joked around and prayed. But OG also lectured them about world affairs and secretive government operations.
The group’s leader wanted to “keep us in the loop,” the article quotes one of OG’s acolytes as saying. “He’s a smart person. He knew what he was doing when he posted these documents, of course. These weren’t accidental leaks of any kind.”
The young member was impressed by OG’s seemingly prophetic ability to forecast major events before they became headline news, things “only someone with this kind of high clearance” would know. He was by his own account enthralled with OG…. “He’s fit. He’s strong. He’s armed. He’s trained. Just about everything you can expect out of some sort of crazy movie,” the member said.
In a video seen by The Post, the man who the member said is OG stands at a shooting range, wearing safety glasses and ear coverings and holding a large rifle. He yells a series of racial and antisemitic slurs into the camera, then fires several rounds at a target.
The member seemed drawn to OG’s bravado and his skill with weapons. He felt a certain kinship with a man he described as “like an uncle” and, on another occasion, as a father figure.
“I was one of the very few people in the server that was able to understand that these (documents) were legitimate,” the member said, setting himself apart from the others who mostly ignored OG’s posts.
“It felt like I was on top of Mount Everest,” he said. “I felt like I was above everyone else to some degree and that … I knew stuff that they didn’t.”
“We all grew very close to each other, like a tightknit family,” the member said. “We depended on each other.” He said that other members, and OG especially, counseled him during bouts of depression and helped to steady him emotionally. “There was no lack of love for each other.”
OG was the undisputed leader. The member described him as “strict.” He enforced a “pecking order” and expected the others to read closely the classified information he had shared. When their attention waned, he got angry.
Late last year, a peeved OG fired off a message to all the members of the server. He had spent nearly an hour every day writing up “these long and drawn-out posts in which he’d often add annotations and explanations for stuff that we normal citizens would not understand,” the member said. His would-be pupils were more interested in YouTube videos about battle gear.
“He got upset, and he said on multiple occasions, if you guys aren’t going to interact with them, I’m going to stop sending them.”
That’s when OG changed tactics. Rather than spend his time copying documents by keyboard, he took photographs of the genuine articles and dropped them in the server….
OG shared several documents a week, beginning late last year…. OG could lay his hands on some of the most closely guarded intelligence in the US government. “If you had classified documents, you’d want to flex at least a little bit, like hey, I’m the big guy,” the member said. “There is a little bit of showing off to friends, but as well as wanting to keep us informed.”
Airman 1st Class Jack Teixeira is arrested by the FBI. Photo: WCVB / Screengrab
The Post article quoted the member as saying that
OG wasn’t hostile to the US government, and he insisted that he was not working on behalf of any country’s interests. “He is not a Russian operative. He is not a Ukrainian operative,” the member said. The room on the server where he posted the documents was called “bear-vs-pig,” meant to be a snide jab at Russia and Ukraine, and an indication that OG took no sides in the conflict.
However,
OG had a dark view of the government. The young member said he spoke of the United States, and particularly law enforcement and the intelligence community, as a sinister force that sought to suppress its citizens and keep them in the dark. He ranted about “government overreach.” OG told his online companions that the government hid horrible truths from the public. He claimed, according to the members, that the government knew in advance that a white supremacist intended to go on a shooting rampage at a Buffalo supermarket in May 2022.
“For all OG’s disdain for the federal government, the member said there was no indication that he was acting in what he thought was the public interest by exposing official secrets. The classified documents were intended only to benefit his online family, the member said. ‘I would definitely not call him a whistleblower. I would not call OG a whistleblower in the slightest,’ he said, resisting comparisons to Edward Snowden, who shared classified documents about government surveillance with journalists.”
US Attorney General Merrick Garland announces Teixeira’s arrest. Photo: Twitter
Hersh’s source(s)
“As long as Europe remained dependent on the pipelines for cheap natural gas, Washington was afraid that countries like Germany would be reluctant to supply Ukraine with the money and weapons it needed to defeat Russia,” Seymour Hersh’s Nord Stream story says.
“It was at this unsettled moment that Biden authorized (National Security Advisor) Jake Sullivan to bring together an interagency group to come up with a plan. All options were to be on the table. But only one would emerge.”
In December of 2021, two months before the first Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, Jake Sullivan convened a meeting of a newly formed task force — men and women from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the State and Treasury Departments — and asked for recommendations about how to respond to Putin’s impending invasion….
The interagency group was initially skeptical of the CIA’s enthusiasm for a covert deep-sea attack. There were too many unanswered questions. The waters of the Baltic Sea were heavily patrolled by the Russian navy, and there were no oil rigs that could be used as cover for a diving operation….
Throughout “all of this scheming,” the source said, “some working guys in the CIA and the State Department were saying, ‘Don’t do this. It’s stupid and will be a political nightmare if it comes out.’”
OK, so Hersh’s original source was involved in the decision-making process but felt it had been rigged and disagreed with the policy outcome.
Mainstream media – including the Post and the New York Times – ignored Hersh’s reporting and there was at first relatively little pressure on the Biden administration to respond.
As pressure increased, the Times and a German media consortium came up with a different version blaming pro-Ukraine forces vaguely defined. That version (cover story?) has been all but laughed off the stage.
Gas leaking from the ruptured Nordstream 1 pipeline off Sweden’s coast. Photo: Swedish Coast Guard
Here is what Hersh is now telling us about his anonymous sources in his most recent article alleging corruption on the part of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky:
The Ukraine government, headed by Volodymyr Zelensky, has been using American taxpayers’ funds to pay dearly for the vitally needed diesel fuel that is keeping the Ukrainian army on the move in its war with Russia… Zalensky has been buying the fuel from Russia, the country with which it, and Washington, are at war, and the Ukrainian president and many in his entourage have been skimming untold millions from the American dollars earmarked for diesel fuel payments.
“Zelensky’s been buying discount diesel from the Russians,” one knowledgeable American intelligence official told me. “And who’s paying for the gas and oil? We are. Putin and his oligarchs are making millions” on it.
Zelensky’s response to entreaties to clean up his act, Hersh writes, was insufficient, “seen, the intelligence official added, as another sign of a lack of leadership that is leading to a ‘total breakdown’ of trust between the White House and some elements of the intelligence community.”
Is this, by chance, the same intelligence official who had spilled the beans to Hersh about the Nord Stream bombings for the original article?
Whoever he or she was or is, “the intelligence official” also complained about “the strident ideology and lack of political skill shown by Secretary of State Tony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan. The president and his two main foreign policy advisers ‘live in different worlds’ than the experienced diplomats and military and intelligence officers assigned to the White House. ‘They have no experience, judgment, and moral integrity. They just tell lies, make up stories.’”
So, Hersh’s source doesn’t like the Biden administration’s top foreign policy people.
He has another source who as quoted doesn’t dish much in the way of dirt but who also dislikes the Biden people and/or their policies:
A prominent retired American diplomat who strenuously opposes Biden’s foreign policy toward China and Russia depicted Blinken as little more than a “jumped-up congressional staffer” and Sullivan as “a political campaign manager” who suddenly find themselves front and center in the world of high-powered diplomacy “with no empathy for the opposition.”
No empathy for Putin and Xi? This is beginning to sound like a Trumpian Republican analysis. Is Hersh quoting a Deep State element, perhaps left over from the previous administration? There’s some nuance that follows but you can read it for yourself.
I personally don’t doubt that real officials and former officials made all these complaints to Hersh. It was and is his call whether or how to report them.
But if, somehow, I came to know the identity of the “intelligence source” who conveyed to Hersh top-secret information about Nord Stream, I’m not sure I would be any more inclined to give that source a pass than I would be to let OG off the hook. (It’s wartime and presumably both had taken oaths to keep the secrets.)
Maybe I would be even less inclined to be lenient, assuming that Hersh’s source is a mature, long-time public servant who had all the more reason to know better.
Bradley K Martin, a longtime foreign correspondent, currently is an associate editor of Global Courant.
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