World | Afghanistan
Story behind biggest leak in intelligence history
The source for these is Wikileaks, the website which specialises in publishing untraceable material from whistleblowers.
- By Nick Davies, Guardian News & Media Ltd
- Published: 00:00 July 27, 2010
London: US authorities have known for weeks that they have suffered a haemorrhage of secret information on a scale which makes even the leaking of the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam war look limited by comparison.
The Afghan war logs consist of 92,201 internal records of actions by the US military in Afghanistan between January 2004 and December 2009 — threat reports from intelligence agencies, plans and accounts of coalition operations, descriptions of enemy attacks and records of meetings with local politicians, most of them classified secret.
The source for these is Wikileaks, the website which specialises in publishing untraceable material from whistleblowers.
Washington fears it may have lost even more highly sensitive material including an archive of tens of thousands of cable messages sent by US embassies around the world, reflecting arms deals and uncensored opinion of other governments.
Neutral territory
Wikileaks' founder, Julian Assange, says that in the last two months they have received yet another batch of "high-quality material" from military sources and that officers from the Pentagon's criminal investigations department have asked him to meet them on neutral territory to help them plug the sequence of leaks. He has not agreed to do so.
Behind these revelations lie two distinct stories: first, of the Pentagon's attempts to trace the leaks with painful results for one young soldier; and second, a unique collaboration between the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel magazine in Germany to sift the huge trove of data for material of public interest and to distribute globally this secret record of the world's most powerful nation at war.
The Pentagon was slow to engage.
The evidence they have now collected suggests it was last November that somebody working in a high-security facility inside a US military base in Iraq started to copy secret material.
Suspect
It was not until late May that the Pentagon finally closed in on a suspect. On 21 May, a Californian computer hacker called Adrian Lamo was contacted by somebody with the online name Bradass87 who started to swap instant messages with him. Bradass87 opened his heart to Lamo.
Secret access
He described how his job gave him access to two secret networks: the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, and the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System.
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