WP: classified Pentagon docs leaked on Discord by alleged military base worker

Classified Pentagon documents containing intelligence collected by the US and several other countries were posted to an invitation-only Discord chat room by a man claiming to be a “military base” worker, The Washington Post reports, citing other members of the group.

The chat room on the Thug Shaker Central private server was named bear-vs-pig and had no more than 20 members. Its members, mostly young men, discussed video games, memes, movies, and politics. The group included users from Russia and Ukraine.

Last year, a user known as OG posted “a message laden with strange acronyms and jargon” and claimed to

“know secrets that the government withheld from ordinary people”.

At the time, few people read the note, a member of the group told WP.

OG claimed that he spent at least some of his day inside a secure facility of a “military base” that prohibited cell phones and other electronic devices and copied the classified documents. He annotated the documents, explaining, for instance, that NOFORN meant the information in the document must not be shared with foreign nationals. Such messages appeared in the chat room regularly for several months. Then, OG began posting photographs of classified documents.

One of the younger chat room members was impressed by OG’s “seemingly prophetic ability to forecast major events before they became headline news”. He claimed OG was in his early to mid-twenties.

“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 told WP.

The young group member said OG wasn’t hostile to the U.S. 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”, WP quotes. OG viewed US law enforcement and intelligence as a sinister force that sought to suppress its citizens and keep them in the dark, complaining about “government overreach”.

Both sources said they knew OG’s real name as well as the state where he lives and works, but refused to share this information while the FBI investigation was ongoing. Discord assured in a recent statement that it was cooperating with the investigation and declined to comment further.

Last week, The New York Times broke the news about a leak of several packages of documents allegedly drafted by the Pentagon that emerged online. These files contained intel on the Middle East, China, as well as the Ukraine war, and particularly the long-awaited counteroffensive that Kyiv has been preparing for some time.

Kyiv denied that the information outlined in the documents had anything to do with its real plans. Senior official Mikhailo Podolyak slammed it as “photoshop and ‘virtual fake leaks’”.

Three US officials told Reuters anonymously that Russia or pro-Russian groups could be behind the leak.