The Daily - What We’re Learning From the Leaked Military Documents

Episode Date: April 13, 2023

A week ago, the world discovered that dozens of classified documents from the American government had been leaked online, including highly sensitive information about Russia’s war in Ukraine and damaging revelations on American spying abroad.David E. Sanger, a national security correspondent for The Times, explains the contents of the leak and what it might mean for the war.Guest: David E. Sanger, a White House and national security correspondent for The New York Times.Background reading: How the latest leaked documents are different from past breaches.A quick guide to what the leaked U.S. intelligence documents say.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From The New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi, and this is The Daily. Tonight, growing concerns as more and more top-secret classified Pentagon documents are being discovered posted on social media. A week ago, the world discovered that dozens of classified documents from the American government had been leaked online. It is a mystery. Who leaked a trove of classified and top-secret documents about the war in Ukraine? The Pentagon says the leaked materials pose a serious risk to security. They included highly sensitive information about the war in Ukraine. The leaked documents expose the United States for spying not just on its adversaries, but also its allies. And in the days since, there's been fallout and damaging revelations about American spying.

Very interesting how these documents have specifically emerged just at a time of heightened speculation as to when Ukraine's counteroffensive may begin. Today, my colleague David Sanger tells us what we're learning from the leak and what it might mean for the future of the war. It's Thursday, April 13th. So David, it's not every day that we have a leak of confidential documents from inside the U.S. government, and particularly in the middle of a war, the war in Ukraine.

What did you think when you heard about these documents? Well, Sabrina, the first thing that came to my mind was the long list of other leaks in U.S. history, frequently involving wars or intelligence. So, you know, the mother of all these leaks was the Pentagon Papers. That was in the early 1970s. And that was a history of the Vietnam War that the Pentagon had put together and that Daniel Ellsberg turned over to the New York Times. But more recently, there were the WikiLeaks in 2010 that involved thousands of State Department the most secret intelligence programs, hacking programs that the NSA has underway. So every one of these leaks, of course, had a huge impact on U.S. policy, on politics, sometimes on U.S. intelligence methods. They often included massive amounts of data, thousands of pages. This leak, which came out last week, was far smaller. We've only seen at this point a few dozen pages of material.

But it's all much more current. So more current, what do you mean by that? Well, Sabrina, in the case of the Pentagon papers in these other weeks, by the time we saw the documents, they were usually years old. In this case, these are PowerPoint slides prepared for the Joint Chiefs and other military officers that are just a month, a month and a half old. And thus, they are very salient to what's happening on the battlefield today. And that's, in some ways, what has got so many people in the U.S. government so worked up, because this could be operationally helpful, tactically helpful to the Russians,

in a way that the previous leaks that we've seen were not. And so how did these documents get out? Do we know? Well, from the looks of it, someone probably printed out pages of this material, got it out of the Pentagon, although we don't know that for sure, and snapped pictures of it, probably with a cell phone, because you can see the edges of the desk that the pages were on. And there's a hunting magazine and other such things around. And then those pictures were posted fairly quickly, within a few days, on a social media platform called

Discord. So Discord, if I'm not mistaken, this is an app that's popular among gamers, popular among young people on the internet. It's something that people use to communicate with each other online. Exactly. And it stayed there for a month with barely anybody in the public noticing. Just out there on the internet. That's right. I mean, you know, the internet is a giant flow, a giant river, and the thought that you would see a couple little fish that are swimming downstream, you know, is pretty small. So people didn't really notice this until just a week ago when it started ending up on a bunch of other channels, including Russian telegram channels. And that's when my colleagues at the time started noticing that there are these documents that are out there,

and they appear to be real, classified, secret and top secret Pentagon briefing notes on the state of the war. But it took a while to sort of trace it back to its origin. Okay, so David, let's talk about what's actually in the documents. What do they say? Well, all of the big headlines initially, Sabrina, were what we learned about the war in Ukraine. And those come on pages that have lots of maps and charts of air defenses and so forth. A lot of this stuff is very much of the moment tactical information about the war, how it's going, assessments of how quickly the Ukrainians are burning through ammunition and will need more, and how quickly the Russians are doing it.

But the most interesting thing is that it's information from inside the Russian military, and it's marked up on the top of some of these pages that it's based on what's called SI, it's the abbreviation on the top, which means signals intelligence. So that tells you that it comes from listening in on the Russians and the military, and to some degree, they're decision makers. And then there's some information from inside the Ukrainian military, suggesting that there's signals intelligence from them as well. Okay, so it's this information from inside Russia and inside Ukraine. What do we learn about Ukrainian capabilities in the war right now? thing we learned, Sabrina, is that while American officials are celebrating how tough the Ukrainians are, how successful they've been so far, and that's all true, they're also worrying about

what these next few months will look like. For example, there's one document that suggests that Ukraine will run out of its air defense capability in early May. In fact, an explicit date, May 3rd, because of concerns about how quickly the Ukrainians are burning through the air defense missiles that they require. Wow, that's soon and that's very, very detailed. Very detailed and dangerous because suddenly the Russians know

exactly what the vulnerability is and when it will arise. Right. And there's another example of a future potential Ukrainian weakness. You'll remember the Ukrainians are using long range rockets, something called HIMARS, that President Biden agreed to give them in the middle of last year. It's a really critical system for the Ukrainians because it's highly accurate and it allows them to hit major targets behind Russian lines from a considerable distance. Now, they are burning through HIMARS ammunition much faster than we imagined and much faster than we can make replacements. So very bad news for Ukraine and potentially good news for Russia in terms of

the balance in the war. Well, that's right. It is bad news. And it becomes particularly important because the Ukrainians are planning this major spring counteroffensive. And this calls into question whether they've got lined up the stuff they need to make that counteroffensive work. What do we learn about Russia, David? What do the documents tell us about what's happening inside Russia? Well, one of the things we learned, Sabrina, is that the U.S. knows in real time when Russian strikes will happen and frequently where they'll happen. Wow. That tells you that the U.S. is really plugged into the Russian military and that all of the Russian efforts to encrypt conversations and protect communications have pretty much been failures. But the documents also include a lot of descriptions of conversations with the Russian civilian leadership and with the military.

And that suggests the United States also has ways of listening in to the people around Putin, though it's impossible to know how or who. And a lot of this, of course, as I said before, seems to be sourced to signals intelligence. So that means we're intercepting their actual communications that we're hacking into their systems, essentially. It doesn't mean we don't have any human sources left in Russia, but it tells you that a lot of this has been obtained through cyber and digital intercepts and not necessarily from human spies. Got it. So we're plugged in in a digital technology way. And that potentially is also quite good for the Russians that it's surfaced in these documents because they can see where their leaks are.

Right. They can ferret them out and close them down, seal up their systems. Well, they can try, but it's not quite that simple. First of all, the documents don't tell you exactly where they're getting this data from. That's clearly been filtered out. Secondly, the Russians may also think that this is somehow, you know, a CIA plant, that it's disinformation made to freak them out. And so they may not believe it. Okay, so the leak may not actually result in Russia being able to plug the holes. But the big takeaway here overall is that these documents show just how deeply the U.S. is plugged into Russia's war effort.

That's right. But the only thing we've learned, Sabrina, and I know this will shock you, is that not only are we spying on the Russians, we're also spying on our own allies, our own partners. Or I should say, we're still spying on them. We'll be right back. So, David, you just told me that the documents also tell us that the U.S. had been spying on its allies, its partners in the war. Tell me about that. Well, let's start with Ukraine. it's pretty clear from these documents that the United States is listening in on the military leadership and some of the political leadership in Ukraine, trying to understand their decisions. Now, that's not a shock. There's been tension between the U.S. and the Ukrainians at various

points, even while the U.S. is training them and equipping them and trying to give them the targeting information that they need to be successful. But it's always going to create a bit of mistrust between President Biden and Zelensky or people in the next tiers down because they know that the United States is listening in on them just as actively as it's listening in on the Russians. And what other countries? Who else is the U.S. spying on? Well, we also learned that the U.S. is deeply into the South Korean National Security Council and deeply inside Israel's Mossad, the spying agency. And those countries are both sort of fence-sitters. They've publicly avoided committing to providing much help to the Ukrainians, even if they've done some help on the side. And so what's particularly important and potentially damaging here is the documents reveal these internal conversations

that are happening among the top leaders in these countries about the war or about the United States. So what do the documents say about South Korea and Israel? What do the documents tell us? Well, let's start with South Korea, Sabrina. I was just there a couple of weeks ago doing some reporting. And when I met senior South Korean officials and I said, look, you're one of the largest producers in the world of a kind of ammunition the Ukrainians need. They're called 155 millimeter artillery rounds. Are you providing them to the Ukrainians? And they would hedge and haw and really wouldn't answer the question and say, well, it's very difficult for us. We have policies about providing weapons into a war zone. And, of course, they really don't want to anger the Russians.

And so then we get these documents, which are dated before my visit to South Korea. And what do we discover? That yes, there's a big fight going on within their National Security Council, that they're afraid that President Biden is going to call President Yoon of South Korea and demand that he provide more ammunition. And this would put him on the spot. It's delicate because Yoon himself is coming to Washington in just a few weeks for a big state visit, the first state visit of an Asian leader to the Biden administration. So this was all embarrassing. And then you turn the page and what do you discover? There is one page that has got basically shipping details of the 155 millimeter rounds, 330,000 of them.

And when they would be sea lifted from South Korea, when they would likely get to Ukraine and in great bureaucratic fashion, how much it was going to cost to send them from one to the other. So what does that mean? Well, it doesn't spell out if that shipment actually went, Sabrina, but it could mean that the South Koreans were quietly providing help or thinking about it and just didn't want it to be publicized. And now, here it is out on Twitter and Discord for the whole world to see. And David, what about Israel? They've been similar to South Korea. You know, they make a big case that they don't get involved in active wars.

But, of course, you know, they're very concerned about their own sovereignty and territory that they believe is their own. But one of the documents lays out an American set of scenarios of events that could happen, like the Iranians taking in aircraft from Russia as part of the Iran-Russia deals that are going on these days that might actually force the Israelis to get off the fence and provide more aid to Ukraine. And it specified what Israeli weapon systems they want. So here we see the U.S. speculating about what conditions might be exploited to draw the Israelis into arming the Ukrainians and getting them off the fence. So in both of these cases, David, both South Korea and Israel, the U.S. is trying to kind of, you know, use a spyglass to see what's coming in terms of helping the Ukrainians. That's right. And the reason that these are embarrassing is that these internal deliberations

are politically sensitive in the countries they're happening in, but they're also central to trying to convince a public in South Korea or Israel that the United States is a trustworthy ally. And people ask the question, well, if that's the case, why are they listening in on our conversations? And, you know, there's a question of whether or not the leak itself makes it harder for these countries to help Ukraine because Ukraine needs the artillery shells and South Korea makes them. And Ukraine needs anti-missile systems and Israel makes them. Right.

So the danger would be that with the publics of those countries, it would be more difficult to do what these governments are doing kind of on the sly. That's right. And when you see it in black and white in a U.S. document that's stamped top secret on it, it sort of leaves very little doubt about what's going on.

So, David, what's the upshot of all these revelations? I mean, in terms of what the Pentagon is actually worried about in the war in Ukraine? Well, you know, Sabrina, what struck me the most as I was paging through these documents is that our government simply does not know where this war is headed. That, of course, it's worried about a stalemate. And General Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said that publicly. But there's more pessimism,

more apprehension that sort of comes off the pages of these documents than officials show in public because, of course, they always want to be supportive of Zelensky. And in that respect, it's got echoes of the Pentagon Papers, right? Because that was contrasting the public optimism, oh yeah, we're doing great in Vietnam, with the public recognition that we were losing the war. Right. But there's something else that I noticed in these documents that really struck me, which is the degree to which the government spends its time thinking about the wild card event, the black swan, that could change everything.

For example? Well, there's one document that's full of these what-if scenarios. It was written just about a year to the day after the invasion happened. So what if Vladimir Putin is killed? Could a much more hardline nationalist leader emerge? It doesn't answer the question, but it's interesting that they're asking it. What if President Zelensky in Ukraine is killed? What happens to the leadership? What happens if the Ukrainians get a hold of a missile that has the reach to fly into Moscow and maybe hit the Kremlin, how would the Russians respond? Would this lead Putin to set off a tactical nuclear weapon,

an issue we spent a lot of time last year worried that he might do? It didn't answer these questions, but the very fact that we're asking them at such high levels in classified sessions tells you that the government wants to be ready if the surprising happens here. In other words, tells us how little we actually know about where this thing is going, right? Well, you know, wars, stock markets, hurricanes, hard to predict the path for any of them. this leak was smaller but more current. Did those leaks, the Pentagon Papers, the WikiLeaks, did in a lot of ways change the course of history, change policy and politics in the United States? Will this one? You know, I've been thinking about this a lot, Sabrina, over the past couple of days, and I don't think it will. I think this leak is big news and gives us a sense of the government's doubts, as we've discussed.

But you know, the previous leaks that we talked about seem to have an ideological motivation, right? Daniel Ellsberg knew that the government was lying to the American people about the progress of the war and was trying to stay in the war despite evidence that it wasn't working, and he wanted to reveal that. You could think that he's a hero, you can think that he's a traitor, but there was an ideological motive there. Edward Snowden believed the government was illegally using the NSA's powers to listen in on Americans. There was some evidence of that,

but there was also a fair bit of evidence that most of its focus was abroad, which is where the intelligence agencies are supposed to be focusing. When you go through these documents, you don't really see, at least I didn't see, an ideological edge. And if you believe that, in fact, this was posted first on a gaming website, it's entirely possible that this was more like barroom argument over the internet than it was ideology. Right. Which may tell you more about this era in America than we really want to know. Right. So my guess is that it will have immediate impact,

particularly because the Ukrainians will have to change some of their operational plans because the Russians will be searching for the ways the United States is listening in on them. will be searching for the ways the United States is listening in on them. But I'm not sure that it will lead to the kind of changes that we remember. There doesn't seem to be much division inside the United States government about the validity, the rightness of supporting the Ukrainians. The arguments that we discover inside these papers are more about whether the Ukrainians can win,

what it will take, what kind of aid they're going to need to get through this next very rough spring and through the year, and whether in the end there is a negotiated settlement to this war. Because the question we have to ask about this war and that sits underneath all of these documents is, tell me how this ends. David, thank you. Thank you, Sabrina. On Wednesday night, the Washington Post reported that the source of the leaked documents is an American citizen, a gun enthusiast in his 20s who works at a U.S. military base. The Post cited two people who were members of the online Discord group the leaker was a part of.

The members told the Post that the leaker shared the documents not as a whistleblower who opposed U.S. policy on the war, but to showcase his access to secret information. We'll be right back. Here's what else you should know today. Today, I'm pleased to announce that EPA is proposing the strongest ever federal pollution technology standards for both cars and trucks. On Wednesday, the Biden administration proposed new climate regulations designed to ensure that by the year 2032, two-thirds of the new cars sold be all electric. Together, today's actions will accelerate our ongoing transition to a clean vehicles future.

The plan is the most ambitious U.S. climate regulation to date and would cause nothing short of a revolution in the auto industry. Vehicles that are fully electric accounted for just under 6% of all new cars sold in the U.S. last year. And A message for all the people in the U.S. last year. And. A message for all the people in Nashville who decided to expel us. You can't expel a home. The second of two Black Democrats expelled from the Tennessee House was reinstated, a week after he was removed by the House's Republican majority.

Local officials in Memphis voted Wednesday to reinstate Justin Pearson. Earlier this week, the other Democrat, Justin Jones, was also reinstated. The two had been banished for supporting gun control protesters during House proceedings. Their expulsion was an act of political retribution, but it ended up propelling them to national fame. You can't expel our voice! act of political retribution. But it ended up propelling them to national fame. Today's episode was produced by Diana Nguyen, Will Reed, Mary Wilson, and Luke Vanderplug. It was edited by Lisa Chow and MJ Davis-Lynn. Fact-checked by Susan Lee, contains original music by Marian Lozano and Dan Powell,

and was engineered by Chris Wood. Special thanks to Julian Barnes. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansford of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. See you tomorrow.