The man believed to be responsible for the leak of hundreds of US defence documents that have laid bare military secrets and upset Washington’s relations with key allies is a 21-year-old air national guardsman based in Massachusetts.
Jack Teixeira was arrested at his home in the town of North Dighton, Massachusetts, by FBI agents on Thursday. Helicopter news footage showed a young man in red shorts, being made to walk backwards towards a team of agents standing by an armoured vehicle dressed in camouflage and body armour, pointing their rifles at him.
The US attorney general, Merrick Garland confirmed the arrest, saying Teixeira was being held “in connection with an investigation into alleged unauthorized removal, retention and transmission of classified national defence information”.
Teixeira was the leader of an online chat group who uploaded hundreds of photographs of secret and top-secret documents, according to the New York Times. The online group called itself Thug Shaker Central, made up of 20 to 30 young men and teenagers who shared their love of guns, racist memes and video games.
Members of the group have told the investigative journalism organisation Bellingcat, the Washington Post and the New York Times that the documents were shared on Thug Shaker Central in an apparent attempt to impress the group, rather than to achieve any particular foreign policy outcome.
The Times said it had seen about 300 of the documents, only a fraction of which have so far been reported, indicating the national security damage could be worse than has been acknowledged.
Earlier on Thursday, Joe Biden, who is on an official visit to Ireland, said: “There’s a full-blown investigation going on, as you know, with the intelligence community and the justice department, and they’re getting close.”
An increasing volume of evidence pointed to the leaker being a disaffected young man with racist views and a preoccupation with guns, who claimed to work on a military base. The person shared photos of the documents on a chat group with about two dozen active members, starting last year and continuing until March.
“I’m not concerned about the leak,” Biden said. “I’m concerned that it happened. But there’s nothing contemporaneous that I’m aware of that’s of great consequence.”
Some of the leaked documents are dated as recently as March, and discussed Ukraine’s troop deployments, military vulnerabilities and efforts to arm its forces before a spring counteroffensive.
There is also evidence of the US spying on allies, and their reluctance to arm Ukraine, and material about Russian forces and decision-making in Moscow that could help the Kremlin better understand the strengths and weaknesses of US intelligence collection efforts in Russia.
Some newly reported documents show knowledge of infighting between the Russian intelligence and the defence ministry. In one document reported by the New York Times, US officials describe how the Federal Security Service (FSB) had “accused the defence ministry of trying to cover up the extent of Russian casualties in Ukraine”.
The FSB said the official statistics did not include the dead and wounded from the national guard or two significant militias involved in combat, the Wagner mercenary force and fighters fielded by the Chechen republic’s warlord leader, Ramzan Kadyrov. The US intelligence assessment was that the spat demonstrated “the continuing reluctance of military officials to convey bad news up the chain of command”.
Despite Biden’s optimistic assessment of the investigation, federal authorities had reportedly not approached an important witness, a teenage member of the internet group that the leaker managed. The teenager talked to Bellingcat at the weekend, and in more detail to the Washington Post on Wednesday.
He described the leaker, referred to by the initials OG, as a charismatic leader. The Post viewed a video of a man identified as OG at a shooting range with a large rifle.
“He yells a series of racial and antisemitic slurs into the camera, then fires several rounds at a target,” the report said. OG told fellow members of the same internet group that he worked on a military base, which was not named in the report, where his job involved viewing large amounts of classified information.
The Pentagon has begun tightening its circle of employees and contractors and has promised to review its policy in granting top-secret clearance. In March, a batch of the documents were shared by a teenage member of Thug Shaker Central on another server dedicated to following a Filipino YouTuber called WowMao, with a wider readership.
A moderator on the WowMao server, known as Kralj, described the teenager who shared the documents as “in his late teens, a good kid with a good heart”.
“He just wants to inform his friends about stuff he’s finding online but didn’t want the documents to leak. It was just bad luck for him that the documents were real,” Kralj added.
According to the teenage member of the group interviewed by the Post, OG “had a dark view of the government”, portraying the government, and particularly law enforcement and the intelligence agencies, as a repressive force. He ranted about “government overreach”.
The Post said details were confirmed anonymously by other members of the group, and that it had viewed a total of 300 photographs of classified documents, three times the number previously thought to be circulating.
The teenage group member told the Post that OG “seemed very confused and lost as to what to do”. “He’s fully aware of what’s happening and what the consequences may be,” he said. “He’s just not sure on how to go about solving this situation … He seems pretty distraught about it.”
In his final message to his fellow group members, OG told them to “keep low and delete any information that could possibly relate to him”, including any copies of the classified documents.
