Photo taken on Feb. 19, 2020 shows the Pentagon seen from an airplane over Washington D.C., the United States. [Photo/Xinhua]
The man who
leaked a trove of U.S. intelligence documents, some marked as top secret, to the public is a young airman enlisted in the Massachusetts Air National Guard (MANG), The New York Times reported Thursday.
Identifying the U.S. service member as 21-year-old Jack Teixeira who works in the MANG's intelligence wing, the Times said it based the finding on interviews and documents it reviewed.
The report said Teixeira is the leader of a private online chat group with members numbering 20 to 30, who were drawn together by their shared love for guns, racist online memes and video games.
Though members of the chat group interviewed by the Times didn't identify the leader by name -- only referring to him as "OG" -- the newspaper said digital evidence it compiled led to Teixeira.
The Times' account seemed to have been corroborated by The Washington Post, which reported Wednesday that "OG" indicated that he had brought home what appeared to be near-verbatim transcripts of classified intelligence documents from his job on a "military base."
Federal investigators probing the incident have yet to identify any leaker, the Times said. President Joe Biden, while visiting Ireland, said Thursday that ongoing investigation involving the intelligence community and the Justice Department is "getting close to" identifying the source of the leak.
The U.S. government has been left in an awkward position in what is believed to be potentially the worst intelligence breach in a decade, not only because the revelation made clear Washington's deeper-than-perceived involvement in the day-to-day development of the Russia-Ukraine conflict and exposed continued U.S. spying on its allies, but also because of the U.S. government's total unawareness of the leak despite the months-long and ever-expanding online circulation of the sensitive materials.
While a Wall Street Journal report said the secret documents, of which most content was believed by U.S. officials to be real, were first posted online in January, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters Tuesday that it was only on the morning of April 6 that he was first briefed on the "unauthorized disclosure."
