For his senior year in high school, Jack Teixeira chose a quote to appear under the photo that featured him smiling in a green hoodie. His choice: “Actions speak louder than words.”
On Friday, Mr. Teixeira, the 21-year-old airman in the Massachusetts Air National Guard, was indicted on two counts under the Espionage Act because, according to federal prosecutors, his actions caused harm to the country to which he had been dedicated to serve. He did not plead guilty.
They said he repeatedly shared classified documents online through a gaming group he belonged to that focused on war, guns and sometimes racist and anti-Semitic memes. It was a remarkable change for a young man who grew up with a passion for the military and guns, sometimes to a bewildering degree, some who knew him said.
Airman Teixeira grew up in a family with strong military ties in Dighton, Massachusetts, a city of about 8,000 people near the Massachusetts-Rhode Island border that retains a distinctly rural character, with tractors in backyards, fresh eggs on the sale in roadside honor boxes and old stone walls winding through the woods. He’s also reliably conservative.
Teixeira’s home sits at the end of a long, heavily wooded lot, where Airman Teixeira’s mother runs a home-based flower business. His stepfather retired as a master sergeant from the same Air Force intelligence unit where Airman Teixeira worked, based out of a base near Cape Cod. He also has a stepbrother in the Air Force, according to a profile of the brother in LinkedIn.
About two dozen people who knew Airman Teixeira when he was in high school did not respond to interview requests or decline to comment. But several former classmates at Dighton-Rehoboth Regional High School remember him as a quiet and somewhat clumsy teenager who sometimes wore camouflage and boots to school.
Kailani Reis, 20, a high school classmate in Airman Teixeira’s graduating class, said that as a student, the airman expressed an interest in guns so often that she and some other students found them “disturbing” and avoided him. . She said few of the former classmates she knew were surprised when she was arrested.
She didn’t remember him talking about politics, but she said he often talked about joining the military and sometimes told encouraging teachers that he wasn’t planning on going to college.
He even skipped his high school graduation in 2020 to report to Air Force basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas.
“Congratulations to my son Jack Teixeira who was unable to attend the ceremony,” his mother posted on Facebook at the time. “It’s too bad they didn’t mention his name at some point.”
In the Air Force, Airman Teixeira became a low-level computer technician at Otis Air National Guard Base in Sandwich, Massachusetts, where his mother said he worked nights, helping keep networks secure. There, he had wide access to a secure facility where he could access a global network of classified material from the military and 17 other US intelligence agencies.
Authorities say Teixeira eventually leaked dozens of documents containing potentially damaging details about the war in Ukraine and other sensitive national security issues.
That a 21-year-old with so little authority could have access to such a trove of top-secret information might surprise the general public, but people who have worked in intelligence say thousands of soldiers and civilians in the The government have access to top-secret materials, including many young and inexperienced workers the military relies on to process the monumental amount of intelligence it collects.
Those workers can log into the Joint Global Intelligence Communications System, essentially a highly classified version of Google, and within milliseconds get reports on Ukraine, China, or just about any other sensitive topic the US government collects intelligence on.
Although their motivations may be different, Mr. Teixeira is remarkably similar to two other high-profile leakers in recent years, Chelsea Manning and Reality Winner, said Javed Ali, a former senior US counterterrorism official who has held intelligence positions at the FBI, the Department of Defense Intelligence Agency and the Department of Homeland Security.
Ms. Manning was a 23-year-old Army intelligence analyst who was convicted in 2013 of turning over 700,000 classified documents to WikiLeaks. Ms Winner was a 26-year-old former Air Force linguist working as a military contractor who in 2017 printed a classified report on Russian hacking, hid it in her pantyhose and gave it to The Intercept.
Unlike Ms. Manning and Ms. Winner, who came to be seen as ideologically motivated whistleblowers, the aviator Teixeira did not appear to be motivated by government policies, according to people who met him online.
But all three of them were relatively young and had security clearances that were the classified intelligence equivalent of having the keys to Dad’s red convertible.
“Clearly his relatively young age is a common factor, and I hope the intelligence community is thinking about that,” said Bennett Miller, a retired Air Force intelligence analyst. “The problem is that the community needs these people. It can’t function without them.”
The words “top secret” may conjure up images of pristine vaults and retina scans, Miller said, but in reality, while some highly classified material sits in silos in special access programs, most of the rest is accessible to thousands of ordinary people who have security clearances. And security can be surprisingly lax.
Often these systems are basically a bunch of computers on a desk and “nothing really stops someone from printing something out and carrying it out,” Miller said, adding: “It’s not as Gucci as people think.”
According to some of the gamers who belonged to a small group created by Airman Teixeira on the social networking site Discord, he liked to play the apocalyptic zombie game Project Zomboid, as well as Arma 3, a tactical shooter known for its attentiveness. realistic in detail. He also liked to lecture to the Discord group about the war in Ukraine and conflicts around the world, sometimes writing for half an hour to share what he was learning from classified intelligence at work.
A member of the group told The New York Times that the group largely ignored the briefings, so a frustrated Airman Teixeira began posting photos of actual classified materials. Those materials were then shared on other online platforms, eventually drawing the attention of federal authorities, who arrested him at gunpoint at his home on Thursday.
Restricting access to classified material could lead to fewer leaks, Miller said, but it could also cut off the flow of information, leading to intelligence failures that are far more dangerous than any of the leakers have done.
“That’s what happened before 9/11,” he said. “We were too locked in and couldn’t put the pieces of the puzzle together. As we search for a solution, we have to make sure we don’t make the same mistake.”
In a Pentagon briefing Thursday, Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder, a spokesman, addressed concerns about Airman Teixeira’s age, noting that the military routinely places tremendous responsibility on young people.
“Think of a young fighter, you know, platoon sergeant, and the responsibility and trust that we place in those individuals to lead troops in combat,” he said. “You receive training and you will receive an understanding of the rules and requirements that come along with those responsibilities, and you are expected to comply with those rules, regulations and responsibilities. It’s called military discipline. And in certain cases, especially when it comes to sensitive information, it’s also about the law.”
