Pentagon leaks: when ‘top secret’ is not so secret after all

Why would a 21-year-old National Guard member be in a position with access to top secret US documents to begin with?

Thursday’s dramatic arrest of Jack Teixeira, an airman in an intelligence unit in the Massachusetts Air National Guard who US federal authorities believe is linked to a leak of reams of classified documents, lays bare the sheer volume of people who have clearance to view national security documents that the government categorizes as top secret.

From National Guard members on bases in Massachusetts to generals at Nato headquarters in Brussels to US bureaucrats all over the world, the “top secret” level of clearance gives bearers an extraordinary level of access. With it, they can see secure Pentagon and other intelligence sites, daily intelligence briefings, situation maps and detailed analyses of the state of the world as seen through the eyes of the US intelligence community.

US service members with top secret clearance include nearly all of the more than 600 or so generals in the various services. But that level of clearance also extends to some of their military aides, many colonels who work in the Pentagon, captains of US navy ships, a wide array of junior officers, and even, in the apparent case of Teixeira, enlisted service members working in intelligence units.

Donald Trump’s claim to immunity from prosecution to be heard by US supreme court today

---

Inside US House speaker Mike Johnson’s conversion on aid for Ukraine

---

Trapped and starving, two families in Gaza Strip try to keep their children alive

---

Last hurrah in Strasbourg for MEPs retiring after elections

---

Pentagon officials say the number of people with such access is in the thousands, if not tens of thousands. And just below them, those with “secret” clearance include nearly everyone else who works for the Pentagon or other national security agencies. There are military contractors and even analysts at think tanks who have some level of security clearance.

[ Pentagon leaks: Jack Teixeira, the gamer who shook the intelligence world ]

The Pentagon will probably be dealing with the fallout from the leaking of scores of pages of sensitive material for months as, in the immediate term, Russian military planners pore over the leaked files for clues to their own compromised agencies. But the case raises broader questions about whether the term “top secret” is actually even secret, and whether national security agencies have allowed their sensitive material to drift too far afield.

“Clearly, too many people have access to too much top secret information” that they have no need to know, said Evelyn Farkas, the top Defence Department official for Russia and Ukraine during the Obama administration.

On Thursday, the Pentagon was reeling from the possibility that the leaker may have been far from the higher echelons of military intelligence and sensitive national security data. Instead of finding him in the offices of the Joint Staff, where senior generals and officials put together many of the documents that were posted to a small online gaming chat group called Thug Shaker Central, officials found themselves raiding the home of Teixeira.

“Each of us signs a nondisclosure agreement — anybody that has a security clearance,” Brig Gen Patrick Ryder, the Pentagon spokesman, said at a news conference. “So all indications are, again, this is a criminal act.”

The arrest of Teixeira, Farkas said, serves as a warning for what awaits those who mistreat classified information. “They’re going to throw everything at him,” she said, “and that’s going to make it more important for the government to take action against others who think that they’re immune because of their senior positions.”

[ Jack Teixeira expected to appear in court over Pentagon leaks ]

A person convicted in such a leak could face extended prison time, officials said. Teixeira was arrested under the Espionage Act, violations of which carry a penalty of up to 10 years in prison per count.

Reality Winner, a former Air Force airman and a National Security Agency contractor convicted of leaking a classified document to the news media, received a five-year, three-month sentence. A Navy engineer, Jonathan Toebbe, who tried but failed to sell secrets to a foreign country that were classified at a lower “confidential” level, received a 19-year prison sentence last year. His wife, Diana Toebbe, received nearly 22 years in prison.

“This was a major security breach that cannot be allowed to happen again,” Democrat Senator Jack Reed, chair of the Armed Services Committee, said in a statement. “Anyone with a security clearance who betrays their country by purposefully mishandling classified documents or disclosing classified materials must be held accountable.”

Some military officials defended the practice of granting security clearances to service members regardless of their age; if someone is old enough to die for their country, they are old enough to be trusted with its secrets, they argued.

It was unclear what level of clearance Teixeira had. But he was detailed to the 102nd Intelligence Wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, and it is possible that he had top-secret clearance, a defence official said.

“There’s the obvious question of why someone in this relatively low rank and rather obscure corner of the military, namely the Massachusetts Air National Guard, could have access to not only some of the nation’s most critical secrets, but such an extraordinary array of them, which could have no possible bearing on his job,” said Glenn Gerstell, a former general counsel of the National Security Agency.

Mick Mulroy, a former CIA officer and top Pentagon official, agreed. “This does bring up just how someone this junior would have access to some of our most sensitive intelligence and documents to brief our most senior officials,” he said. “This should give us pause as to who has access to this level of material and how and why we allow people to print such material.”

Two major changes in how intelligence was handled in the past helped set the stage for the most recent leaks.

After September 11th, US intelligence agencies began sharing material much more widely across the government. Then, after the failed intelligence assessment that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, intelligence agencies started sharing more about the sources of their information and their confidence in how reliable the material might be.

On Thursday, a few hours after Teixeira was arrested, Deputy Defence Secretary Kathleen Hicks sent out a memorandum restating rules for handling classified material.

“Personnel with access to classified information are trusted stewards of that information and the responsibility to safeguard classified information is a lifetime requirement for each individual granted a security clearance,” she wrote. - The New York Times

2023 The New York Times Company