Barreling Toward War With Iran Is More Concerning Than A National Security Leak

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President Joe Biden’s administration has deployed at least 100 United States troops to Israel, along with an anti-ballistic missile defense system, to help the Israeli government as it pursues an attack on Iran.

When the Israeli military strikes targets in Iran, the U.S. will become a party to the armed conflict between Israel and Iran.

"To introduce troops into hostilities, per the 1973 War Powers Act, you either need an authorization from Congress, or there needs to be some urgent and imminent self-defense threat," said former U.S. Army major Harrison Mann, who resigned in protest over Israel's war on Gaza.

"In this case, the supposed self-defense threat is an Iranian missile attack. But the irony here is the Iranian missile attack is only going to happen if we help Israel strike Iran first," Mann added.

Amidst this stark development, leaked top secret U.S. military intelligence documents from the Pentagon and National Security Agency (NSA) circulated during the past several days. They were published on October 18 to a Telegram channel called the Middle East Spectator.

U.S. prestige media organizations refused to publish the newsworthy documents. They instead summarized their contents and focused attention on the Telegram channel that posted the information as well as the U.S. government’s hunt for the source of the disclosure. 

Meanwhile, Dave DeCamp, Ken Klippenstein, and DropSite News shared the information and enabled crucial debate and discussion about U.S.-Israeli military plans for an attack on Iran. (Klippenstein was recently visited by the FBI after he published the J.D. Vance dossier, which U.S. prestige media had been sitting on since June.)

One document shared with the “Five Eyes” countries (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom) reflects extensive U.S. surveillance of Israeli military operations at Hatserim Airfield, which is located in the northern part of the Negev Desert. 

The Israeli Air Force has “handled at least 16 Golden Horizon ALBMs,” which are air-launched ballistic missiles, “and at least 40 IS02 (Rocks) ALBMs” since October 8, according to the document. It assesses that the Israeli Air Force likely handled air-to-surface missiles at the Ramat David Airfield and the Ramon Airfield and engaged in “covert” activity with drone aircraft at the Ramon Airfield. 

Haaretz noted that “Golden Horizon” was not a name “previously released publicly, making it difficult to identify. It may refer to a missile from the Sparrow series, typically used as a target for aerial defense systems but also capable of offensive use, like the missiles it simulates.”

U.S. Monitoring Whether Israel May Deploy A Nuclear Weapon

The second document, which is from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA), is dated October 16. It lists how confident NGA analysts are that they were able to detect Israeli military preparations for an attack on Iran. 

“We cannot definitively predict the scale and scope of a strike on Iran, and such a strike can occur with no further GEOINT [geospatial intelligence] warning,” the document states. It later indicates, “We did not observe any Jericho II medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBM) activity on 16 October,” and, “We have not observed indications that Israel intends to use a nuclear weapon.” 

The Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation has concluded that anywhere from 24 to 100 Jericho II missiles are “nuclear-capable.” The missiles were developed in cooperation with apartheid South Africa in the 1980s. 

The mention of Israel’s nuclear weapons is remarkable for two reasons: the U.S. government has refused to publicly acknowledge that Israel possesses nuclear weapons, and this shows that U.S. military and intelligence agencies are anxious about the possibility that Israel may deploy a nuclear weapon against Iran. 

At a U.S. State Department press briefing on April 29, journalist Sam Husseini asked State Department spokesperson Verdant Patel:

Does Israel have nuclear weapons? Because there is U.S. law that says that there should be a funding cutoff under the Arms Export Control Act and the Glenn-Symington Amendments that says that there shouldn’t be aid to nuclear proliferators, and Israel is a damn sure nuclear proliferator. But last time I asked, you folks won’t even acknowledge the existence of Israel’s massive nuclear arsenal.

Patel responded, “I still don’t have anything for you on that, Sam,” and once again the State Department refused to acknowledge that Israel has nuclear weapons.

Conforming To The National Security State

Both CNN and Axios were two of the first media outlets to report on the leaked documents. Conforming to the U.S. and Israeli intelligence services, CNN informed readers, “CNN is not quoting directly from or showing the documents.”

Barak Ravid, a former analyst for Israel espionage unit, Unit 8200, authored a post for Axios and did not link to the documents. Ravid wrote without evidence that the Middle East Spectator, the Telegram account that shared the documents, was “affiliated with Iran”—as in the Iranian government. 

“The Telegram channel routinely publishes pro-Iranian content, and the profile of the X account affiliated with the channel says it is located in Iran,” Ravid added.

This description of the Middle East Spectator was adopted by various other U.S. media organizations, but the channel insisted they are not “Iran-affiliated.” They are a “tight-knit team of fully independent journalists.”  

The New York Times, the Associated Press, Reuters also reported on the leaked documents but did not include copies of the documents in their coverage. 

As the Times pointed out, the documents are not a “comprehensive assessment of what the United States knows about Israeli intentions.” 

“Officials were divided over the seriousness of the leak, which did not appear to reveal any new American capabilities,” the Times added. “The documents describe but do not show the satellite images. 

“If no further document come to light the damage would be limited, some of the officials say—besides revealing, once again, the degree to which the United States spies on one of its closest allies. Other officials say that any exposure of an ally's war plans is a serious problem.”

Anonymous U.S. officials told the Times on October 19 that “they did not know from where the documents had been taken, and that they were still hunting for the original source of the leak.

But based on previous unauthorized releases, officials said it was most likely a lower-level government employee.”

If the source is a lower-level government employee who shared the documents with the Middle East Spectator, then it is possible that the individual is a whistleblower. An FBI counterintelligence team is almost certainly trying to uncover the identity of this person so that they may prosecute them for violating the Espionage Act. 

In 2023, Jack Teixeira, a former member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, posted U.S. military documents on Discord that detailed U.S. involvement in the war in Ukraine. He was charged with violating the Espionage Act, and in March 2024, Teixeira accepted a plea deal which came with an 11-year prison sentence. (That is an extraordinary amount of time for someone accused of transmitting “national defense” documents and unlawfully retaining them.) 

The New York Times and the Washington Post proudly helped the FBI hunt down Teixeira, even though leak prosecutions almost always result in a chilling effect that negatively impacts government transparency and discourages potential sources from communicating with the press. 

U.S. officials have an insider threat program with vast resources to identify the source of the leaked documents. They do not need assistance from journalists, editors, or media producers. Yet it is a virtual certainty that prestige media will track down "clues" that may help government agents while dismissing the risk posed by the planned escalation.

The world will hear from U.S. officials, like House Speaker Mike Johnson, that the leak is “very concerning” and presumably more troubling than secret Israeli military operations that threaten to pull the U.S. government into a war with Iran. (Johnson lusts for a U.S.-backed bombardment that would flatten Iran.)

News reports say Biden is "deeply concerned" as well. Perhaps, what is so bothersome is that the veil of secrecy, which is necessary to deceive people into believing that the Biden administration has everything under control, was momentarily pierced. Or put another way, as Trita Parsi of Responsible Statecraft wrote, the leak undermined the mythology around American leadership.