The news and newspapers are filled with headline reports about a cache of leaked Pentagon documents insinuating their potential for materially influencing the outcome of Russia’s war against Ukraine. The cache of approximately 100 briefing slides of real-time operational data on the war includes maps of Ukrainian air defenses and South Korea’s covert plans to deliver 330,000 rounds of ammunition.
The usual suspects have opined that the leaks are the end of the world. Staggering unknown unknown evils could be born to the advantage of Russia. A criminal referral has been made to the Department of Justice.
This hysteria is worthy of disbelief, like the boy who called wolf too many times. First, intelligence reports are routinely wrong. Think of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the Bay of Pigs predicting a massive uprising against Fidel Castro, the intelligence confidence China would not enter the Korean War with millions of soldiers to assist North Korea, or the bomber or missile gaps with the Soviet Union. Russia might also view the slide cache as disinformation calculated to mislead like Stalin did in receiving repeated accurate warnings from the West about the imminence of Adolf Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa in World War II.
Second, evidence that leaked intelligence materially injures the national security or foreign policy of the United States is slim to none. The trove of State Department cables taken by Chelsea Manning and published by Wikileaks founder Julian Assange provoked Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to hallucinate that no one would ever again talk to American diplomats. But diplomacy continued without even momentary interruption.
No evidence has surfaced showing Edward Snowden’s disclosures caused national security injury to the United States. The 47 volumes of classified information leaked and published as the Pentagon Papers disclosing the chronic, monumental lies told about the Vietnam War was innocuous to the national security. Erwin Griswold, who argued the case for censorship in the United States Supreme Court on behalf of the Nixon administration in New York Times v. United States (1971), later reflected:
“I have never seen any trace of a threat to the national security from the publication. Indeed, I have never seen it even suggested that there was such an actual threat… It quickly becomes apparent to any person who has considerable experience with classified material that there is massive overclassification and that the principal concern of the classifiers is not with national security, but rather with governmental embarrassment of one sort or another.”
So why does the media continue to hype national security leaks as disasters?
Columnist Robert Novak explained in his memoir that he never criticized his sources: “That’s the way the world works. Very few reporters will admit that.”
Pentagon confirmed the leak of classified documents: "As a result of the leak, extremely secret, classified information was published, which poses a very serious risk to US national security, and which was used by the US Department of Defense and other government agencies," which seems somewhat dubious to me. I think it only confirms that the leak was a fake. If it was my secret information getting out, would at least communicate that its fabricated or altered to spin some heads? iffy.