This news about the sudden appearance of top secret US intelligence material on internet gamester websites has me puzzled. What’s the motive here?

If a traitor in the US really wanted to stick it to America, he would have just sent the material straight to the Russians, right? And they would pretend that they had never received it. After all, what’s the point of letting someone know you’ve penetrated their defenses and cracked their codes? And you certainly don’t want them to know you have a mole in their ranks. You don’t warn them by publishing the stuff! You use it to plan your response but keep it quiet.

Its possible that its all a counter-intelligence operation. You send the Russians a bunch of bogus documents in the hope they’ll believe it and
completely overhaul (and cripple) their plans. Of course, you make it a point to include just enough legitimate, verifiable secrets to make them believe the rest of the stuff is pure gold. Its the old Le Carre chicken feed scam, what Karla sent to the Circus so his mole could justify his shipment of real UK secrets to the KGB. That’s plausible, but not likely. Any transaction that’s TOO complex or involved would make any spymaster worth his salt suspicious as hell. It would be better to just send them the material directly.

Or would it? Maybe a data drive filled with secrets would just be too obvious, perhaps it would be better to publish via a third party and let Ivan believe he had discovered it all on his own, through his own cleverness. You could go crazy trying to navigate all the permutations and combinations of the double-cross leak here, but that way lies madness. Suffice it to say, no intelligence officer accepts unquestioningly a gift of secrets without carefully identifying and understanding its source, and its motivations. Gift horses can be trained to bite, and they could be rabid.

What this looks like on the surface is that some idiot with access to Top Secret classified docs is trying to impress his pals with how cool he is, and publishing it all on a gamer’s website all his buddies follow but then fails to identify himself. Or maybe the Russians acquired the material through skilled spycraft, but have now milked it dry and are releasing a highly edited version with negative references to them carefully snipped out–all just to cause confusion and disorder for us. Naah, that doesn’t ring true either. If they had discovered the material on their own, they would never let on they had it. But, if it showed up on their doorstep unsolicited and they didn’t trust its authenticity, this publication through a third party makes sense.

Something smells here. I wouldn’t believe a word of it.