Inside the Pentagon Leak

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, SENIOR GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST: Well, we turn now to Boston, where a 21-year-old low ranking national guardsman has been charged over the most significant leak of U.S. military secrets in a decade. The classified Pentagon documents that Jack Teixeira allegedly posted on social media exposed the depth of U.S. buying and revealed details of Ukraine’s military plans. The Pentagon is in damage control, understandably, calling it a deliberate criminal act. One of the reporters who first broke the story of Shane Harris from “The Washington Post.” He joins Walter Isaacson to explain how he tracked down the suspect.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

WALTER ISAACSON, HOST: Thank you, Bianna. And Shane Harris, congratulations on the scoop you and your “Washington Post” colleagues got and welcome to the show.

SHANE HARRIS, REPORTER, THE WASHINGTON POST: Thanks, Walter. Thanks for having me.

ISAACSON: So, you were able to track down this guy, Jack Teixeira, the 21- year-old national guard guy, who leaked all these secrets, was arrested this week. You tracked them down on a Discord server. Discord is a sort of a clubhouse where people can create their own conversation groups online. Tell me what — tell me about that server. What type of people were there and how did you find out about it?

HARRIS: Well, on this particular Discord server, the two dozen or so members that were active on it, their common interest was actually kind of guns and military hardware. They met in a separate room on Discord, which is actually popular with gamers and video game enthusiasts, and they were very into guns and YouTube videos about people shooting guns, and they kind of split off and formed their own group where they were kind of united by that common interest —

ISAACSON: And these groups are only, right?

HARRIS: Yes. Totally, invitation only. And this guy, Jack Teixeira, was essentially, you know, the club director. He had administrator privileges on this server. So, he decided who got invited, who didn’t, who could come and who could go. And he sorts of became the elder figure, even though he’s quite young himself, but it was a lot of teenage boys and younger men, and he was sort of the group leader or the clubhouse leader, if you want to think of it that way.

ISAACSON: And so, how did you know about him? You and Samuel, you know, got this scoop. Explain how you got it.

HARRIS: Well, we were able to find through social media when these documents were breaking, more than a week ago, into public view individuals who claimed to have some knowledge about the matter and seemed to be connected to it in some way. And so, we started reaching out to people. And one of the people we made contact with is the individual that you see profiled in our story, who was one of these members of the group, and we were able to go meet with him to verify his identity. And then, through a series of very long interviews, which we were able to corroborate, essentially get the story that we tell in the paper of what it was like inside this Discord server where one day this guy. Jack Teixeira, just started posting classified documents.

ISAACSON: It seems like it was kind of a crowdsource thing to figure out, all right, we know the pseudonym, how do we figure out who the real guy is?

HARRIS: Yes. It was very interesting. If you read “The Times,” they story identify him basically through a data trail. There’s not individuals who revealed Jack Teixeira, and they wouldn’t reveal them to us either, the people we talked to, his friends really protected him. It was more the footprints that he left on various servers and social media platforms that he was moving on. And so, ultimately, it’s kind of this very online guy is revealed through that very online presence. You know, ultimately, it’s what revealed him to the wider world and potentially to authorities too. They have the ability to, you know, go through some of these accounts and to subpoena information which, of course, we as journalists cannot do.

ISAACSON: Well, it sounds like a Sherlock Holmes novel. But crowdsource, where everybody’s looking at a speck of dust or a peel of orange.

HARRIS: Exactly.

ISAACSON: What other clues were in it?

HARRIS: You know, I thought that was interesting if you looked at the classification markings on some of the documents that told you about the level of clearance this person was likely to have. And what might be surprising to some people is that the clearance level spoke to somebody who had fairly standard security clearance. None of this information was so highly compartmented that, you know, only a very few or a handful of people who would get it. This looks like information that, as revealing as it was, we understood that thousands and thousands of people would have access to it. The other thing was some of it looked like briefing materials that were prevented — presented for much more senior officials. We knew some of these Ukraine war maps, for instance, were in materials that we believe have been presented to General Mark Milley, the chairman of the joint chiefs. That told us, OK, are we looking at somebody who’s in a support role, somebody whose job is to kind of put booklets together and get materials together, that was helpful too in trying to ascertain, you know, is this person somebody who’s inside the Pentagon, in Milley’s office, or are we talking about somebody who’s working more at a remove from the Pentagon in a support role? And that’s ultimately what Jack Teixeira proved to be.

ISAACSON: Wait. So, this guy is one of thousands who are doing things, he has access to what you call the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communication System, and yet, he’s a 21-year-old gamer. Just how in the world did he get access to all of it?

HARRIS: You know, the short answer is, this is how the Intelligence Community changed after the 9/11 attacks. You know, before 9/11, the intelligence communities — you know, famously, the intelligence agencies kept a lot of their information siloed into themselves. So, NSA have what it knew and it kept it in its box. And CIA put its things in its box. And there wasn’t a lot of sharing and mingling of that. The 9/11 attacks kind of made the argument that you need to have more collaboration that the Intelligence Community is going to be aware of all the threats that are out there in the world. And the structures and the procedures started changing to allow much more lower-level people access to more highly level — highly classified information. This explains, you know, WikiLeaks with, you know, Chelsea Manning, then Bradley Manning. This explains how someone like Reality Winner was able to get access to classified information. All these people who we know have leaked information in the past from their fairly low-level jobs. I think what this case is going to raise more questions about is, why hasn’t the Intelligence Community figured out, OK, if you’re going to have information spread out all over the place, are you going too far? Why is it that these low-level young people still have access to all of this information that they could potentially expose? And I think those are going to be big policy questions for the Intelligence Community coming out of this, because after the last big go round of these kinds of leaks, we heard intelligence officials saying, we’re going to clamp down on this. We’re going to try and make it so this can’t happen anymore. It keeps happening. I mean, the Edward Snowden leaks, for an example of this too. So, the Intelligence Community has adapted after 9/11 to this more collaborative environment, but it comes at significant costs. And this exposure, this leak is one of them.

ISAACSON: President Biden in Ireland said that he was more concerned about the fact of the leak than he was about the substance of the things leaked. I think I’m going to read it to you. He said, I’m concerned that it happened. But there’s nothing contemporaneous that I’m aware of that is of great consequence. Is that true?

HARRIS: I mean, it’s interesting that he would say that considering, you know, I think this document like really reveals a lot about the penetrations that the U.S. has into foreign adversaries. And I think that the information, while very revealing, a lot of it is stuff that, you know, we’ve gotten from journalistic sources. To me, what’s so remarkable about this is that it shows all the ways the U.S. is gathering this information. So, I mean, you can read these documents and pretty clearly infer, for instance, that the U.S. Intelligence Community has deeply penetrated the Russian ministry of defense and the Russian military. Now, maybe the Russians already figured that they had, but that kind of revelation about sources and methods is traditionally what intelligence communities — agencies try to prevent. And, you know, I must say, I mean, that’s the president’s view on this, of course, but I must say, talking to people in his administration and intelligence officials, they seem a lot more alarmed and are very nervous about the fact that there are more documents out there that reporters are continuing to look at.

ISAACSON: So, compare this to Edward Snowden. Is this a worse leak than Edward Snowden?

HARRIS: I think it’s a qualitatively different league. And to my mind, I actually think it’s more significant. And as you mentioned, I’ve written a lot about surveillance and the kind of world that Edward Snowden exposed. The Snowden leaks went very deep on a big and important subject. So, you know, cyber surveillance, signals intelligence, NSA monitoring, but the aperture of that lens was kind of focusing and it was sort of narrowed on NRA. And a lot of the documents that he actually revealed were PowerPoint presentations, you know, prepared for internal briefings in which it appeared, in some cases, people might even be exaggerating some of the capabilities in order to impress their bosses or get funding. These leaks are just covering the world. I mean, it is almost as if you were just given access to, you know, the top-secret daily newspaper, which is not really a thing, but like what intelligence officials are telling policymakers about everything that’s going on around the world, from Iran, North Korea, Russia. You get a window into what people like the president and the secretary of defense and the secretary of state are hearing every day, and you get a sort of demonstration of the full range of capabilities of U.S. intelligence. You’ve got signals intelligence information in there, you’ve got imagery, you’ve got information from human sources. So, this is really kind of like, you know, the buffet, if you want to think of it that way, of U.S. espionage. And to my mind is just far more revealing in its detail and in its breadth than the Snowden files, which went very deep on one particular kind of intelligence gathering.

ISAACSON: We didn’t hear a whole lot of squeals from our allies that seemed to have been spied upon a bit or at least that signals intelligence on them a bit. Is that because some of this was shared with them as well?

HARRIS: Well, I think there’s — it could be that some of it was shared with them and they had knowledge in maybe some of the things that were in here. I think there’s also just kind of a basic understanding that, you know, countries spy on each other. The U.S. tries to monitor what’s going on inside Israel. We look at many of our other allies, not as adversaries, but we’re keeping tabs on them. And also, a lot of these countries are the beneficiaries and sometimes the recipients of U.S. intelligence. And I think that they know that there’s kind of a bit of an implicit bargain there that, if you’re going to be getting information from us, understand that we might be doing a little information gathering on you too.

ISAACSON: One of the members of the group you talked to said that this discussion group was “not a fascist recruiting server.”

HARRIS: Yes.

ISAACSON: Why would they say that and was it to some extent?

HARRIS: Well, they say that because, you know, the name of the server, they call it Thug Shaker Central, which is a racist illusion that maybe an idea that it — a name that escapes amount of people. But it’s referenced with a lot of racial underpinnings and racist overtones to it.

ISAACSON: Wait, wait. Explain that to us.

HARRIS: Well, Thug Shaker is a reference to a meme, that’s a racist meme that has gone around on the internet that white people share when they’re sort of ridiculing black people, frankly, and it’s kind of taken on currency with the alt-right, with people who are in a lot of gaming platforms that kind of lean right. And a lot of these kids, and many of them were kids, were sharing racist and anti-Semitic memes and jokes, and it’s hard for me to know is that because they were genuinely, they felt that way or because as offensive and it’s kind of alien as that may seem to you and me and a lot of people, they just thought it was funny or they thought that it made them seem kind of sophisticated or cool. The overtones, as it was described to us by these members of the group was very like, alt-right, it leaned conservative, but not in a political way, and they were all quite religious. They consider themselves to be orthodox Christian, which is an interesting kind of wrinkle of this. And I think that when we spoke to these individuals, particularly the one teenager we talked to at length, they were really aware of the fact that how the outside world was going to look at this. OK. Right. So, you’re all kind of sharing racist jokes. You’re anti-Semitic. You like guns. You kind of define is alt-right. This and you’re, you know, led by this older person with all these kids, this kind of has aspects and elements of what looks like recruitment, and they were just trying to, I think, dispel the notion that it was somehow a politically motivated group. You know, they didn’t talk about politics a lot, they said. I think this is just an element of them being really sensitive now too, now that they’re exposed to the world what they look like and how the world is going to interpret that, and fairly, frankly, in some cases. I mean, if you’re sharing racist and anti-Semitic jokes all the time, you know, maybe it’s because you harbor racist and anti-Semitic views, but that doesn’t appear to have anything to do with the motivation as far as we can tell for why Jack Teixeira shared this information with these people in this room.

ISAACSON: What do you think the motivation was?

HARRIS: As it was described to us — and I have to say I’ve been covering intelligence for over 20 years and I’ve never seen a motivation like this. It was essentially to impress these teenagers. I mean, Teixeira, because of his job had access to a ton of classified information that, as he explained it to these young people, gave him access to things that, you know, mere mortals and average citizens didn’t know, and he really did gain some sense of power from that, they tell us. Some of the people who read this information, when he started sharing it, said, well, he was doing it to kind of keep us informed about world events. There was almost like sort of a tutor pupil aspect to this relationship where he thought, I’m going to educate all of you. You should really see what’s going on. And he appeared to have a fairly conspiratorial view, we should say, about the government and the world and kind of thought he was waking his followers up or bringing them into the inner circle by sharing this information. And you know, I asked one of them. I said, well, how did you feel when you saw this highly classified information that, you know, ordinary people don’t get to see every day about what’s going on in Russia and Ukraine or Iran and North Korea? And his words were, I felt like I was on top of Mount Everest. I felt like I was above other people because I knew things they didn’t. And so, it’s kind of this culture of exclusivity and superiority that seems to have created an environment in which Teixeira to was showing his own don a few days (ph) and kind of flexing in front of these younger people by showing them, look how important I am. I know all these things. And now, I’m going to let you know them too. I’ve never seen a leak go innovated by that. People leak information either for money or because they want to expose what they think is wrong doing in the government. I’ve never seen someone expose government secrets to impress teenagers.

ISAACSON: You say that there was a video, and I think you saw the video —

HARRIS: Yes, I did.

ISAACSON: — of him shooting guns and shouting racist and anti-Semitic comments. Describe that video and tell us what he was shouting.

HARRIS: So, in the video, he is at a shooting range, it appears, and he’s wearing safety goggles and the kind of big earmuffs that you would wear when firing a rifle and he’s holding a large rifle, and someone appears to be filming him on a camera, probably with a phone. And he shouts the N word and he shouts a slur about Jewish people, and the context of it is as if he’s saying, and this is what you’re going to get, and then, he starts firing off the rifle onto a target. That’s the implication that he seemed to be saying these slurs and he was using the N word and shooting the gun as a way of saying — seeming threatening or targeting. And, you know, when these individuals showed us the video, I honestly don’t think they understood it to be serious. I think they thought he was being funny. Most people would look at this video and find that very alarming and quite threatening and say, well, is this somebody who is, you know, promoting violence or indicating that he might commit it? It was it was a pretty chilling video, frankly, for me and my colleague to see and gave us a bit of pause about, OK, are we not just dealing with the leaker here? But is this potentially a violent person? And I do note that when the FBI arrested Jack Teixeira at his home yesterday, they were in full tactical gear. They were in body armor, which I think tells you that they were holding out the possibility that he might be heavily armed himself and perhaps wouldn’t go easily.

ISAACSON: Do you either think that corners of the internet, private servers on, you know, various internet social media sites, as well as COVID and other things have stirred up incubated conspiratorial type things that we’re seeing these days?

HARRIS: I do. I think that this story is something that maybe could only happened during the pandemic. I mean, this server group that they call, this Thug Shaker Central Club, it formed during the pandemic and became a refuge for a lot of these teenage boys who were cut off from each other in real-life, they couldn’t get together with their friends, they were locked in their homes and they spent, by their account, basically all of their waking hours in this room. And I think it was isolating. I think it was, you know, potentially — you know, it kind of worked their sense of reality, and they’re living in a world in which things just are very online. And my impression from talking to two of them was that they didn’t even really understand — they didn’t deeply understand the real-world implications of this information that they were seeing and it getting out. And I just got the feeling that this was kind of a story that was very of the moment that these disaffected and very impressionable kids isolated by the pandemic were around this older person who was, you know, persuading them of certain things and in some ways, holding them in thrall to him. We see — it was — you know, it was kind of a spooky kind of atmosphere that spoke to, you know, the control that it seemed like he had over these young people.

ISAACSON: Shane Harris, thank you so much for joining us.

HARRIS: Thanks, Walter. It’s been a pleasure.