July 27: A 22-year-old US Army intelligence analyst, facing a court-martial, appears to be behind the biggest leak in US military history of classified documents on the war in Afghanistan that also exposed Pakistan’s double-game in the war-torn country, including its Taliban links.
Bradley Manning, who allegedly boasted online that he was going to reveal “the truth” about the war in Afghanistan, is believed to be the main suspect who leaked the information to Wikileaks, the Telegraph reported. Mr Manning was arrested in Baghdad in May and charged in July with multiple counts of mishandling and leaking classified data, after a computer hacker turned him in, the paper said.
Wikileaks, the website known for publishing secret government documents, has exposed Pakistani ISI’s links with Afghan insurgents and Taliban, undermining US-led efforts to stabilise the war-torn nation. With over 90,000 US military documents leaked on the website, the expose is considered to be a huge embarrassment for the US.
During online chats with the hacker, a man thought to be Mr Manning said he had passed material relating to Afghanistan to Julian Assange, the founder of the Wikileaks website which leaked more than 92,000 secret documents to select media. Mr Manning, who is currently awaiting a court martial, is widely assumed to have been the man who passed the documents to Assange, though investigators believe he must have had accomplices.
Mr Manning is alleged to be a whistle-blower who used the online name Bradass87 when he contacted a high-profile Californian computer hacker, Adrian Lamo, on May 21, the paper said.
Over the following five days, Bradass87 held a series of online conversations with Lamo, in which he identified himself as “an Army intelligence analyst, deployed to eastern Baghdad” with “unprecedented access to classified networks”.
He said his job gave him access to two high-security networks: the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, SIPRNET, which carries US diplomatic and military intelligence; and the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System, which includes “top secret” classification.
Bradass87 said the networks had enabled him to see “incredible things, awful things that belong in the public domain and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington D.C. almost criminal political backdealings the non- PR version of world events and crises”. He said he had downloaded 260,000 classified or sensitive state department cables and transmitted them by computer to Wikileaks.