When WikiLeaks spilled a huge trove of State Department cables 13 years ago, it gave the world a sense of what American diplomats do each day \u2014 the sharp elbows, the doubts about wavering allies and the glimpses at how Washington was preparing for North Korea\u2019s eventual collapse and Iran\u2019s nuclear breakout.<\/p>\n
When Edward Snowden swept up the National Security Agency\u2019s secrets three years later, Americans suddenly discovered the scope of how the digital age had ushered in a remarkable new era of surveillance by the agency \u2014 enabling it to pierce China\u2019s telecommunications industry and to drill into Google\u2019s servers overseas to pick up foreign communications.<\/p>\n
The cache of 100 or so newly leaked briefing slides of operational data on the war in Ukraine is distinctly different. The data revealed so far is less comprehensive than those vast secret archives, but far more timely. And it is the immediate salience of the intelligence that most worries White House and Pentagon officials.<\/p>\n
Some of the most sensitive material \u2014 maps of Ukrainian air defenses and a deep dive into South Korea\u2019s secret plans to deliver 330,000 rounds of much-needed ammunition in time for Ukraine\u2019s spring counteroffensive \u2014 is revealed in documents that appear to be barely 40 days old.<\/p>\n
It is the freshness of the \u201csecret\u201d and \u201ctop secret\u201d documents, and the hints they hold for operations to come, that make these disclosures particularly damaging, administration officials say.<\/p>\n
The 100-plus pages of slides and briefing documents leave no doubt about how deeply enmeshed the United States is in the day-to-day conduct of the war, providing the precise intelligence and logistics that help explain Ukraine\u2019s success thus far. While President Biden has barred American troops from firing directly on Russian targets, and blocked sending weapons that could reach deep into Russian territory, the documents make clear that a year into the invasion, the United States is heavily entangled in almost everything else.<\/p>\n
It is providing detailed targeting data. It is coordinating the long, complex logistical train that delivers weapons to the Ukrainians. And as a Feb. 22 document makes clear, American officials are planning ahead for a year in which the battle for the Donbas is \u201clikely heading toward a stalemate\u201d that will frustrate Vladimir V. Putin\u2019s goal of capturing the region \u2014 and Ukraine\u2019s goal of expelling the invaders.<\/p>\n
One senior Western intelligence official summed up the disclosures as \u201ca nightmare.\u201d Dmitri Alperovitch, the Russia-born chairman of Silverado Policy Accelerator, who is best known for pioneering work in cybersecurity, said on Sunday that he feared there were \u201ca number of ways this can be damaging.\u201d He said that included the possibility that Russian intelligence is able to use the pages, spread out over Twitter and Telegram, \u201cto figure out how we are collecting\u201d the plans of the G.R.U., Russia\u2019s military intelligence service, and the movement of military units.<\/p>\n
In fact, the documents released so far are a brief snapshot of how the United States viewed the war in Ukraine. Many pages seem to come right out of the briefing books circulating among the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and in a few cases updates from the C.I.A.\u2019s operations center. They are a combination of the current order of battle and \u2014 perhaps most valuable to Russian military planners \u2014 American projections of where the air defenses being rushed into Ukraine could be located next month.<\/p>\n
Mixed in are a series of early warnings about how Russia might retaliate, beyond Ukraine, if the war drags on. One particularly ominous C.I.A. document refers to a pro-Russian hacking group that had successfully broken into Canada\u2019s gas distribution network and was \u201creceiving instructions from a presumed Federal Security Service (F.S.B.) officer to maintain network access to Canadian gas infrastructure and wait for further instruction.\u201d So far there is no evidence that Russian actors have begun a destructive attack, but that was the explicit fear expressed in the document.<\/p>\n
Because such warnings are so sensitive, many of the \u201ctop secret\u201d documents are limited to American officials or to the \u201cFive Eyes\u201d \u2014 the intelligence alliance of the United States, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. That group has an informal agreement not to spy on the other members. But it clearly does not apply to other American allies and partners. There is evidence that the United States has plugged itself into President Volodymyr Zelensky\u2019s internal conversations and those of even the closest U.S. allies, like South Korea.<\/p>\n
In a dispatch that is very reminiscent of the 2010 WikiLeaks disclosures, one document based on what is delicately referred to as \u201csignals intelligence\u201d describes the internal debate in Seoul over how to handle American pressure to send more lethal aid to Ukraine, which would violate the country\u2019s practice of not directly sending weapons into a war zone. It reports that South Korea\u2019s president, Yoon Suk Yeol, was concerned that Mr. Biden might call him to press for greater contributions to Ukraine\u2019s military.<\/p>\n
It is an enormously sensitive subject among South Korean officials. During a recent visit to Seoul, before the leaked documents appeared, government officials dodged a reporter\u2019s questions about whether they were planning to send 155-millimeter artillery rounds, which they produce in large quantities, to aid in the war effort. One official said South Korea did not want to violate its own policies, or risk its delicate relationship with Moscow.<\/p>\n
Now the world has seen the Pentagon\u2019s \u201cdelivery timeline\u201d for sea shipments of those shells, along with estimates of the cost of the shipments, $26 million.<\/p>\n
With every disclosure of secret documents, of course, there are fears of lasting damage, sometimes overblown. That happened in 2010, when The New York Times started publishing a series called \u201cState\u2019s Secrets,\u201d detailing and analyzing selected documents from the trove of cables taken by Chelsea Manning, then an Army private in Iraq, and published by Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder. Soon after the first articles were published, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed fear that no one would ever talk to American diplomats again.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn addition to endangering particular individuals, disclosures like these tear at the fabric of the proper function of responsible government,\u201d she told reporters in the Treaty Room of the State Department. Of course, they did keep talking \u2014 though many foreign officials say that when they speak today, they edit themselves with the knowledge that they may be quoted in department cables that leak in the future.<\/p>\n
When Mr. Snowden released vast amounts of data from the National Security Agency, collected with a $100 piece of software that just gathered up archives he had access to at a facility in Hawaii, there was similar fear of setbacks in intelligence collection. The agency spent years altering programs, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, and officials say they are still monitoring the damage now, a decade later. In September, Mr. Putin granted Mr. Snowden, a low-level intelligence contractor, full Russian citizenship; the United States is still seeking to bring him back to face charges.<\/p>\n
But both Ms. Manning and Mr. Snowden said they were motivated by a desire to reveal what they viewed as transgressions by the United States. \u201cThis time it doesn\u2019t look ideological,\u201d Mr. Alperovitch said. The first appearance of some of the documents seems to have taken place on gaming platforms, perhaps to settle an online argument over the status of the fight in Ukraine.<\/p>\n
\u201cThink about that,\u201d Mr. Alperovitch said. \u201cAn internet fight that ends up in a massive intelligence disaster.\u201d<\/p>\n