Pentagon leak: How secret US files spread then vanished online

The suspected leaker of a large batch of US military documents, Jack Teixeira, has been charged in a Boston court and detained pending trial, but where did the classified files come from and how were they shared online?

We've pieced together what we know about how they first appeared and where they spread online.

First appearance of documents

The documents were initially posted on a small private chat group called "Bear vs Pig".

This was itself a sub-group of another known as "Thug Shaker Central" on the Discord social media platform.

Both were accessible by invitation-only and had around two dozen members.

In court papers in support of Mr Teixeira's arrest, the FBI says he first posted classified information online as paragraphs of text "in or about December 2022".

It says he then posted photographs of documents "in or around January 2023".

Who was in the initial chat group?

In interviews with the Washington Post and New York Times, members of Thug Shaker Central say they had initially met in another Discord group dedicated to fans of a YouTuber who posts videos about guns and military gear.

These members say that during the Covid lockdowns, they broke away to form their own private group and that Mr Teixiera was the driving force in this new close-knit community.

Members of group say it not only contained US citizens but also others from Ukraine, Russia, South America and elsewhere.

For a few months the classified documents remained private to this group.

Public sharing of the documents

Attention has focused on an individual with the user name "Lucca" who, in early March, posted some of the documents on a public channel on Discord called "wow_mao".

This same user was also a member of the Thug Shaker Central community, according to the New York Times.

Shortly afterwards, in another public Discord channel, during a brief argument about the online game Minecraft and the war in Ukraine, a user says "here, have some leaked documents" and posts several screenshots.

It was following this public sharing of the documents that Mr Teixeira quickly deleted Thug Shaker Central, including its sub-group, Bear vs Pig.

On 5 April, screenshots of the documents appeared on the message board 4chan, one of the biggest and most controversial hubs of internet subculture.

They were shared on one of 4chan's most notorious boards known as /pol/ - standing for politically incorrect - by anonymous users during an argument about the exact number of Ukrainian and Russian casualties there had been in the conflict.

Just a few hours later, these documents began appearing on pro-Kremlin Telegram channels and were also picked up by prominent military bloggers.

One image - widely circulated by Russian channels - was edited to reduce the number of Russian troops killed and inflate the Ukrainian losses.

By 7 April, the documents were also circulating on some of the major social media platforms, such as Twitter and Reddit.

Russian response

Initially, pro-Kremlin Telegram channels who shared the screenshots did not dwell much on the authenticity of the documents, focusing largely on their content.

But soon several prominent channels and media outlets started to lean towards portraying the documents as at least partly fake.

An expert quoted by ultranationalist news website Regnum suggested the documents may be a deliberate leak aimed at providing a smokescreen for the coming Ukrainian counter-offensive.

On state TV, Yuri Podolyaka, a prominent war commentator, said this was "planted information" intended to mislead Russia about the counter-offensive.

Olga Skabeyeva, host of state Rossiya 1 TV's 60 Minutes talk show said the West had been doing "all it can to create the image of a weak Ukraine whose shells are running out and which has nothing left at all".

The leak was discussed at length on Russian television

Questions about the authenticity of the documents have been raised in Ukraine too, with some commentators accusing Russia of planting fake documents ahead of the Ukrainian counter-offensive.

Disappearing documents

Multiple screenshots of the documents - often of poor quality - are still circulating on Twitter, Telegram and Reddit.

But the originals are much harder to find. A lot of the original copies have now disappeared from the chats where they first emerged.

Others who shared the screenshots on Discord, Telegram and Twitter have either wiped out their feeds or deleted their social media profiles altogether.

And there's a great deal of paranoia too.

One user who has previously shared screenshots of the documents on Discord told fellow users they'd been trying to get rid of all the copies they had on their phone.

Another was quick to respond to a plea to share more documents on the forum with: "Nice try FBI".

Additional reporting by Adam Robinson and Daniele Palumbo.