Minutes before a small army came to arrest him with armored vehicles and automatic weapons, Jack Teixeira was still reading a book on the porch of his childhood home – as the FBI helicopter flew over rural Dighton, Massachusetts, looking for the source of the leak of classified US defense documents. On Thursday, the 21-year-old soldier in T-shirt, shorts and high lace-up shoes was arrested. On Friday he heard in court that he is suspected of espionage.
Teixeira is trained as an IT professional, specialized in the maintenance of communication systems. Coming from a family with strong ties to the military, he himself joined the Air Force National Reserve in October 2021. He was called up for active duty last fall, he said The Washington Postthe newspaper that The New York Times over the past few days, managed to collect most of the details about Teixeira, including his identity. This article is mainly based on their coverage.
Those details provide clues, but are inconclusive, about Teixeira’s motives or how it is possible that a 21-year-old deputy at an air force base had access to hundreds of documents containing military secrets.
Project Zomboid
Under exotic internet pseudonyms such as TheExcaliburEffect or Jack-thedripper, Teixeira moved online in private chat groups of Discord, a social medium where mainly gamers meet. In the support group Thug Shaker Central – named after a black porn star who has many memes circulating online – Teixeira started posting secret documents about the war in Ukraine under the name OG from October.
Thug Shaker Central was all about memes, guns and video games. Especially war games, such as Project Zomboid, where players must survive fighting zombies in post-apocalyptic Kentucky. “We like fighting, we like war games,” a 17-year-old member of the group countered The New York Times. They preferred to make black jokes and the anti-Semitic cries that ‘O.G’ once uttered during a virtual shooting should, according to a member of the group, be seen in the light of the “many layers of irony” that are piled on top of each other online. “He was just an average Catholic who liked guns.”
According to ‘OG’, the twenty or thirty members of the support group, mainly men and boys who had sought each other’s company during the corona lockdowns, had a better understanding of what was going on in the world. He was frustrated that “kids from the suburbs were discussing a war on the other side of the ocean” when they barely knew anything about it, says a friend of Teixeira in The Washington Post.
Competent
Eventually, “OG” would post some 350 secret documents to the private Discord group, after which one of the members copied them to another platform, where they were noticed by the outside world. The Ministry of Defense would only have noticed last week that it had a leak. Modest as his function was, Teixeira had “possible top clearancea ministry spokesperson said on Thursday. Clearance this means that after inspection he has been declared authorized to inspect confidential documents. “Once you are authorized, you can basically do anything,” The New York Times quoted Glenn Gerstell, a former senior NSA spy officer.
For example, while working at Otis Air Force Base in Massachusetts, where data from drones and U2 spy planes are processed, Teixeira was able to look at secure websites of the Pentagon and intelligence services. He could see maps, such as those of the war situation in Ukraine, briefings and analyses. The most important reports can only be viewed in so-called SCIFs (sensitive compartmented information facility – a completely isolated room). The term suddenly appeared in all kinds of messages last year after it emerged that former President Donald Trump had taken confidential state documents from the White House and kept them in an unsecured place in his home.
Employees can only enter these cells after they have handed over telephones, laptops and other recording or photo equipment outside. What they can do: take a printout of documents housed in the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System. Apparently Teixeira managed to smuggle such prints off the base and take them home. There he began making transcripts, which he posted to his online chat group. He later took pictures of the copies he had smuggled in. The New York Times compared the background of those photos to snaps Teixeira’s sister had posted on her social media pages for his birthday. According to the newspaper, the kitchen worktop in those photos matched the photos of the secret documents.
Read also: How the war in Ukraine becomes intertwined with Taiwan
Three million
In the American media, the debate about access to state and military secrets has flared up again. The prosecution has already investigated the confidential documents found in the homes of former President Trump, President Joe Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence. Now an investigation into “the largest leak in more than a decade” has been added.
“Thousands, if not tens of thousands,” of Americans have supreme authority to see the most confidential (top secret) intelligence, say anonymous Defense officials The New York Times. One level lower is allowed about three million people secret view information. Among them are also analysts who work at think tanks.
“In any case, there are too many people with too wide access to top secret information,” said Evelyn Farkas, under President Obama as the top official in charge of Russia and Ukraine. “Access is now mind-bogglingly wide,” said Gerstell.
According to the newspaper, two measures in response to shocking international events are partly to blame for this broad accessibility. After the attacks on September 11, 2001, the secret services decided to exchange and share much more information. And after the exposure of the claim that the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein would have weapons of mass destruction, more information about the origin and reliability of information has also been shared.
On Friday, the army top announced that it would draw up new protocols that will limit access to confidential documents again. According to The New York Times the military is more casual in providing access to confidential information than the intelligence services. Defense officials point out that it is also possible that Teixeira has allowed herself access to information without permission.
Embarrassed
In the past, the US government has often been embarrassed by large-scale leaks of confidential information. Whistleblowers such as Daniel Ellsberg (on the Vietnam War), Bradley Manning (on the Iraq War), and Edward Snowden (on the NSA’s far-reaching espionage activities) deliberately released information to warn the world of what they already believe was wrongdoing. considered. They took their information to journalists who reviewed it, verified it and published it in the context of their medium.
In 2016, WikiLeaks released thousands of emails from presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and other Democrats. US intelligence and experts are convinced that they came from a hack by Russian spies.
It appears that Teixeira is neither a whistleblower nor a stooge of foreign services. The testimony of members of the Thug Shaker Central newspaper support group paints a picture of a young man who viewed the war in Ukraine, which most of the documents deal with, as a “depressing struggle between two countries that are more alike than they are.” differ from each other”. He wanted to “inform and impress” his interlocutors about this. The impressing is reminiscent of the comment Trump made on Truth Social about the confidential documents in his possession: “One cool souvenir.”
Charlie Stevenson, lecturer in international studies at Johns Hopkins University, was quoted in various American media. He coined a new category of ‘nice’ for Jack Teixeira: “The boaster who wants to show how initiated he is”.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of April 15, 2023.