How they see us: Intel leak shows U.S. to be unreliable
The news of Washington’s latest leak of military secrets reads “like a Hollywood screenplay,” said Maurin Picard in Le Soir (Belgium). A 21-year-old low-level U.S. airman trying to impress online friends shared the documents in a gamer chat room? That plot could have been written by the Coen brothers. But “nobody is laughing” in Europe. The top-secret documents include vital information that European leaders don’t want shared, including “a critical assessment of the Ukrainian armed forces” and Ukraine’s “glaring shortage of ammunition.” The material also reveals the Pentagon’s doubts about Ukraine’s ability to execute a counteroffensive against invading Russian forces. That means the breach poses “a potential danger” to Ukraine, said Enrico Franceschini in La Repubblica (Italy). Moscow now knows not only the weaknesses of the Ukrainian forces but also “how, and to what extent, U.S. intelligence services are spying on the Russian offensive.”
What a clown show, said Annett Meiritz in Handelsblatt (Germany). “The gigantic security apparatus of the U.S. is apparently being protected amateurishly.” The suspect, Jack Teixeira, uploaded secret document after secret document for weeks and weeks before U.S. intelligence caught on. “That’s a scandal in itself!” But the bigger scandal is that he put the intelligence of America’s allies at risk. Germany shares significant information with American intelligence—should we continue doing so? After all, one of the leaked documents has marks showing it was part of the
“Five Eyes” intelligence pool of the U.S. plus Australia, Canada,
New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. If America plays fast and loose with that information, it will with ours too. Authorities in the other Five Eyes countries are now asking themselves whether they can still trust the U.S., said Andrew Tillett in the Financial Review (Australia). Staffing at U.S. security agencies ballooned after 9/11, and information sharing among those agencies was made a priority. The result is that there are now at least a million Americans with some type of security clearance. That means “more links in the human chain that could break: more people who could turn whistleblower, more people who could turn mole, more people who could boast about their insider cred.”
It’s hard to overstate what a “humiliation” this is for the U.S., said Gerard Baker in The Times (U.K.). The secrets revealed have “laid bare Washington’s strategic disarray, ineptitude, and weakness.” The revelation that the U.S. was spying on its South Korean ally is embarrassing for Seoul, coming ahead of a state visit to the U.S. The disclosure that Israel’s Mossad was complicit in some of the demonstrations against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanhayu will infuriate Israeli intelligence and politicians. And the news that the U.K. has at least 50 special forces troops operating inside Ukraine could put British lives at risk. No wonder America’s allies, “whose secrets have been spilled so liberally,” are growing tired of following Washington’s lead on the world stage. The ramifications of this “shocking blow to U.S. intelligence prestige” will reverberate for years.