Dozens of leaked Defense Department classified documents posted online reveal details of U.S. spying on Russia’s war machine in Ukraine and secret assessments of Ukraine’s combat power, as well as intelligence gathering on America’s allies, including South Korea and Israel.
NBC News obtained more than 50 of the leaked documents, many of them labeled “Top Secret,” the highest level of classification.
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The documents first appeared online in March, and a senior U.S. official said Saturday that the government’s “working theory” is that they are real, although some of them could have been altered.
The full impact of the leak remains unclear, but it could represent the most serious breach of U.S. intelligence secrets since a contractor for the National Security Agency, Edward Snowden, passed on thousands of classified documents to journalists about U.S. electronic surveillance in 2013. In this case, the scale of the disclosure is much smaller, involving dozens instead of thousands of documents.