FBI Arrests National Guardsman After Biggest Security Breach In 10 Years

Old-fashioned investigative reporting by The New York Times led the paper to identify the alleged leaker of the Pentagon documents as Massachusetts Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira, also known as “OG” by members of a small online gaming chat group.

Journalists arrived at a residence linked to Teixeira on Thursday, where they confronted his mother. Around the same time, The Associated Press reported the FBI was still narrowing down its suspect pool.

Federal agents arrested the guardsman at his mother's North Dighton, Massachusetts, home Thursday afternoon.

According to The Washington Post's video interview with a person who belonged to the chat group, Teixeira, 21, didn't hate the government but had an exceedingly low opinion of law enforcement and the intelligence community:

OG told his online companions that the government hid horrible truths from the public. He claimed, according to the members, that the government knew in advance that a white supremacist intended to go on a shooting rampage at a Buffalo supermarket in May 2022. The attack left 10 dead, all of them Black, and wounded three more. OG said federal law enforcement officials let the killings proceed so they could argue for increased funding, a baseless notion that the member said he believes and considers an example of OG's penetrating insights about the depth of government corruption.

OG's group itself had a dark side. The Discord server's eventual name, Thug Shaker Central, was a racist allusion, and signaled to members that they were free to hurl epithets and crude jokes. The young member expressed some regret for their behavior but seemed to shrug off the offensive remarks as a clumsy attempt at humor.

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“Most people in the server were smart enough as to kind of realize that … they shouldn't be posted anywhere else,” the member said. And yet, the group contained foreign citizens— including fromRussia and Ukraine, the members said — a defiance of the NOFORN warning printed across the top of so many documents OG shared.

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For years, U.S. counterintelligence officials have eyed gaming platforms as a magnet for spies. Russian intelligence operatives have been suspected of befriending gamers who they believe work for intelligence agencies and encouraging them to divulge classified information, a senior U.S. official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information.

It's not known, publicly at least, how successful those efforts have been.

Teixeira shared the intelligence with the 20-30 members of Thug Shaker Central, most of them teenage boys, where he had established himself as a father figure. He alternated between patiently explaining the information in layman's terms and excoriating his disciples when they didn't show his level of interest in world affairs.

One young follower speculated to The Washington Post about Teixeira's motives. The group found his ability to predict international incidents ahead of the news cycle prophetic.

Although Teixeira belonged to his unit's intelligence wing, it's unclear how he obtained access to dozens of sensitive U.S. intelligence documents. They included top-secret reports that'd require months-long background checks even to see. Some depicted the range of the latest North Korean nuclear ballistic missiles, others the reality of the damage to Ukraine's energy infrastructure and even eye-level photographs of the high-altitude Chinese spy balloon that transited the continental United States earlier this year.

Millions have now seen the documents.

Federal agents continue to conduct “authorized law enforcement activity” at the Teixeira family residence.

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