Federal agents on Thursday arrested Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old intelligence operative with the Massachusetts Air National Guard, who is believed to be the prime suspect behind the Pentagon-documents leaks.
“This is a law enforcement matter,” Brigadier General Patrick Ryder said during a Pentagon news conference on Thursday, declining to answer specific questions, citing the ongoing investigation.
He added: “This was a deliberate criminal act. `
The leaked documents primarily consisted of briefing slides of operational data from the ongoing war in Ukraine. The classified material included maps of Ukrainian air defense systems and even details about South Korea’s furtive attempts to deliver hundreds-of-thousands of ammunition rounds to Ukraine.
While observers have noted that earlier hacks, namely Wikileaks and the Edward Snowden cache, comprised a more comprehensive swath of information, the latest scandal is particularly damaging given its relevance to an ongoing hot war.
The 100-plus-pages of documentation may further endanger American espionage agents currently embedded within the Russian intelligence bureaucracy.
The New York Times, the outlet that first broke news of the arrest, examined the classified documents which revealed that China contemplated providing crucial military aid to Russia. Moreover, an earlier incident involving a Russian fighter jet targeting a British surveillance vehicle, “could have amounted to an act of war.”
Teixeira was reportedly a member of an online social-media platform, Discord, and led a channel known as Thug Shaker Central that bonded over a love of guns and video games.
“He’s fit. He’s strong. He’s armed. He’s trained. Just about everything you can expect out of some sort of crazy movie,” an anonymous member told the Washington Post on Wednesday.
“I was one of the very few people in the server that was able to understand that these [documents] were legitimate,” the unnamed source told the Post.
“It felt like I was on top of Mount Everest,” the man said. “I felt like I was above everyone else to some degree and that…I knew stuff that they didn’t.”
President Joe Biden, currently in Ireland, earlier on Thursday said that federal law enforcement were close to apprehending a suspect in the case.
“There’s a full blown investigation going on, as you know, with the intelligence community and the Justice Department, and they’re getting close,” Biden told reporters.