Two revelations about secret documents from the US Pentagon and the secret services have surfaced on social media in the past week. According to US media reports, the more than 100 classified documents contain information about Ukraine, China and the Middle East. The documents also provide details about US and NATO aid to Ukraine, the New York Times reported.
While the entire US government is waging a massive effort to find out who had access to these documents – the international investigative collective “Bellingcat’ found what they were looking for more quickly in a 20-person chat group. The research collective even spoke to several of the 20 active users of the “Discord” messaging platform, from which the documents may have come.
Documents previously surfaced in Mindcraft chat group
First, the “New York Times” reported on five documents that had appeared on the Internet and were said to contain information on the current situation in Ukraine. The documents surfaced on Russian Telegram channels and quickly spread to other social media.
The documents are said to have been put online on the Discord platform as early as March – at least this is the result of research by the collective. After multiple leads, Bellingcat reached out directly to members of the Discord community where the images were originally posted. The discovery took a bizarre turn: The Discord channels in which the documents were posted were said to have been about the computer game Minecraft and the fan base of a Filipino YouTube star.
On March 4th – more than a month before the first Telegram posts – according to Bellingcat, ten documents were published on a Discord server called “Minecraft Earth Map”. There is said to have been a brief dispute between users about Minecraft maps and the war in Ukraine. Particularly explosive: A Discord user responded with the words: “Here, take some leaked documents” and attached ten documents about Ukraine, some of which were marked as “Top Secret”, according to the research collective.
Documents photographed with a hunting rifle in the background
The documents were not scanned, but photographed. This is shown, among other things, by the fact that creases can be seen on the documents. Various objects can also be seen in the background of the March documents, including a box with a hunting rifle and some gorilla glue. This suggests that at least some of the documents were photographed at the same location.
The documents then spread to other websites, such as the 4Chan imageboard, before appearing on Telegram and Twitter in recent days, and finally being published by major media outlets around the world.
The origin of the documents goes back to another server
The user who shared the documents later claimed on Twitter that he received them from another user on a Discord server called “WowMao,” run by and for fans of a popular YouTuber of the same name.
Bellingcat was also able to follow this lead: On March 1st and 2nd, a “WowMao” user is said to have published more than 30 documents on the server, corresponding to the publication on the Minecraft server. The same user is also said to have posted dozens of other documents about Ukraine on this server before they were deleted on April 7. Bellingcat saw these posts but was unable to independently verify the authenticity of the documents they contained.
One document dates back to January
However, the “WowMao” server may not be the original source of these documents. The research collective has spoken to members of a separate Discord community who are claiming that additional images were posted to another server operating under different names, including “Thug Shaker Central”. However, this server is said to have been deleted in the meantime.
The image files submitted to Bellingcat are said to contain another document dated January 13 with the same formatting and style as those published on the “WowMao” server. The server “Thug Shaker Central”, originally named after its founder, changed server administrators several times, and is said to have had up to 20 active employees. A member of the server named “Vakhi” told Bellingcat that a new member has taken responsibility and is the original source of the published documents.
“Just the tip of the iceberg”
However, Vakhi did not want to give the name of this person. According to Vakhi and two other anonymous users who spoke to the research collective, significantly more documents were published on Thug Shaker Central than on WowMao. The files leaked on WowMao are therefore only “the tip of the iceberg”. Apart from the statements of these users and isolated references to its existence on “4chan”, there is no further reference to this server.
It is still unclear whether the user is actually the original source of the secret documents and whether there are other sources.
