WASHINGTON—A trove of leaked Pentagon documents reveals just how deeply Russia’s security and intelligence services have been penetrated by the United States, demonstrating Washington’s ability to warn Ukraine of planned attacks and providing an assessment of the strength of the Moscow war machine.
The documents paint a picture of an exhausted Russian army fighting its war in Ukraine and a military apparatus that is deeply compromised. They contain real-time daily warnings to US intelligence agencies about the timing of Moscow attacks and even their specific targets. Such intelligence has allowed the United States to relay crucial information to Ukraine on how to defend itself.
The documents lay bare the US assessment of a Ukrainian army that is also in dire straits. The documents, dated late February and early March but found on social media sites in recent days, describe critical shortages of air defense munitions and discuss progress Russian troops are making in the eastern city. of Bakhmut. Intelligence reports show that the United States also appears to be spying on Ukraine’s top political and military leaders, a reflection of Washington’s struggle to gain a clear view of Ukraine’s fighting strategies.
The material reinforces an idea that intelligence officials have long recognized: The United States has a clearer understanding of Russian military operations than Ukrainian planning. Intelligence gathering is often difficult and sometimes incorrect, but the trove of documents offers perhaps the most complete picture yet of the inner workings of Europe’s biggest ground war in decades.
US officials said that while the documents offer clues about US methods of gathering information about Russian plans, US intelligence agencies do not yet know if any of their information sources will be cut off as a result of the leak. US officials have admitted that they have lost some sources of information since the war began, but the new documents appear to show that the US understanding of Russian planning remains broad.
But the leak has the potential to do real damage to Ukraine’s war effort by exposing which Russian agencies know best about the United States, giving Moscow a potential opportunity to cut off sources of information.
The leak has complicated relations with allied countries and raised questions about the ability of the United States to keep its secrets. After reviewing the documents, a senior Western intelligence official said the release of the material was painful and suggested it could curb intelligence sharing. For various agencies to provide material to one another, the official said, requires trust and guarantees that certain sensitive information will be kept secret.
The documents could also damage diplomatic relations in other ways. The newly revealed intelligence documents also make it clear that the United States is not only spying on Russia, but on its allies as well. While that will hardly surprise officials, going public with such spying always hampers relations with key partners such as South Korea, whose help is needed to supply Ukraine with weapons.
Senior US officials said an investigation, launched Friday by the FBI, would try to move quickly to determine the source of the leak. The officials acknowledged that the documents appear to be legitimate intelligence and operational reports compiled by the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, using reports from the government’s intelligence community, but that at least one had been modified from the original at some later point.
A senior US official called the leak “a massive intelligence breach”, made worse by showing Russia the extent to which US intelligence agents were able to penetrate the Russian military apparatus. US government officials with security clearance often receive such documents via daily emails, one official said, and those emails can be automatically forwarded to others.
Another senior US official said tracing the original source of the leak could be difficult because hundreds, if not thousands, of military and other US government officials have the necessary security clearances to gain access to the documents. The official said the Pentagon had instituted procedures in recent days to “block” the distribution of highly classified briefing documents. The documents posted online were photographs of folded papers, some with images from a magazine on the back, information that can help investigators.
The documents show that almost all of Russia’s security services appear to have been penetrated by the United States in some way. For example, one entry, marked top secret, discusses the Russian General Staff’s plans to counter the tanks that NATO countries were providing to Ukraine, including creating different “fire zones” and beginning training for soldiers. Russians about the vulnerabilities of the different Allied tanks.
Another post talks about an information campaign being planned by the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence unit, in Africa to try to mold public opinion against the United States and “promote Russian foreign policy.”
While some intelligence reports offer analysis and ample warning about Russian plans, others are the kind of actionable information Ukraine could use to defend itself. One entry discusses the Russian Defense Ministry’s formulation of plans to carry out missile strikes against Ukrainian forces at specific sites in Odessa and Mykolaiv on March 3, an attack that US intelligence agencies believed to be designed to destroy a drone storage area and an air defense weapon. and kill Ukrainian soldiers.
Yet another entry discusses a February report released by the Russian National Defense Command Center about the “decreased combat capability” of Russian forces in eastern Ukraine.
Although the documents were compiled by the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, they contain intelligence from many agencies, including the National Security Agency, the State Department’s Office of Intelligence and Research, and the CIA. Some of the material is labeled as collected under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, noting that further distribution is not permitted without permission from the attorney general.
One section of the documents is labeled the CIA Operations Center Intelligence Update for March 2. That section looks at intelligence on how the Russian defense ministry had considered measures to counter allegations that it had not been supplying ammunition to Wagner group troops in Ukraine. according to a signals intelligence report.”
