WASHINGTON — The Defense Department is hunting for the source of the leaked Israeli plans to attack Iran as the National Security Council called the breach “unacceptable.”
“I know the Department of Defense is investigating this and I’m sure that as they work through that, they’ll try to determine the manner in which they did become public,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters Monday, adding that the Biden-Harris administration cannot yet say how the classified documents became public.
“That is not supposed to happen,” Kirby said, “and it’s unacceptable when it does.”
President Biden is “actively monitoring” the investigation, and “remains deeply concerned about any leakage,” Kirby added.
The papers were released over the weekend on Telegram by the account @Middle_East_Spectator, which in a statement said it was unaware of “any additional leaked classified US documents” and had “no connection to the original source, which we assume to be a whistleblower within the US Department on [sic] Defense.”
Military analysts such as Atlantic Council senior fellow Alex Plitsas have said the information provided the Jewish state’s enemies with key insight into Israel’s military capabilities.
“This weekend’s leak of the US assessment of Israel’s readiness to conduct the attack was damaging because it provided the status of the readiness but also what wasn’t ready & would allow an adversary to focus their intelligence collection on those elements,” Plitsas posted to X on Monday. “Dangerous & unhelpful.”
As the Defense Department works to uncover who leaked Israeli plans to attack Iran, the White House claimed to be confident that there will be no further surprise document dumps.
“We don’t have any indication, at this point, that there’s an expectation that there will be additional documents like this finding their way into the public domain,” Kirby said.
US-Israel relations have come under strain since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack that killed an estimated 1,200 people in southern Israel.
The Israel leak comes 18 months after the Pentagon lost face over then-Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira’s leak of Ukrainian war plans involving Kyiv’s counteroffensive against invading Russians.
That leak caused similar distrust and tensions between Washington and Kyiv.
Teixeira, who was 22 at the time of his arrest, was sentenced to 16 years in prison this past March after he admitted to six counts of willful retention and transmission of national defense information.
