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US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin speaks at a press briefing on April 11. (AFP/Yonhap)

Even as South Korea’s presidential office claims that a substantial number of the documents leaked from the US Department of Defense — including documents allegedly produced through surveillance of Korea’s National Security Office (NSO) — were actually fabricated, American defense and intelligence chiefs have basically acknowledged that most of the leaked documents are authentic. Since the presidential office has failed to explain what was fabricated and how, doubts remain about the validity of that claim.

Referring to the documents that appear to be the result of surveillance, NSO First Deputy Director Kim Tae-hyo said Wednesday that South Korea and the US are “in agreement that a substantial number of the leaked documents were fabricated.” An official at the presidential office also said, “Let us be clear: the claims about surveillance are outrageously false.”

But the presidential office didn’t explain what was fabricated, nor is it clear what kind of surveillance the office is claiming did not occur. At the same time, Washington hasn’t offered any kind of statement to back up Seoul’s claims.

American officials are generally saying that some of the 100 or so documents related to the war in Ukraine are inconsistent with the originals.

“It does appear that at least in some cases, the information posted online had been altered from what we think would be the original source,” said John Kirby, coordinator for strategic communications for the White House National Security Council, in a briefing Monday.

Kirby added that the Pentagon is leading an effort to compare the real documents with the leaked documents to assess their validity.

In connection with this, the New York Times reported that some of the leaked documents had reported the number of Russians killed in the fighting as being 16,000-17,500 and the number of dead Ukrainians as being 61,000-71,500, slashing the Russian losses and inflating the Ukrainian losses from the figures in the actual intelligence reports.

Experts who have tracked the route by which the documents were leaked believe that some of them were originally posted on Discord, a chatting app generally used by gamers, and then manipulated while they were being shared on 4chan, Telegram and Twitter. In other words, authentic documents were leaked, but their content was doctored during distribution.

But the US government is less concerned about the fabrication or manipulation of the leaked documents than the serious security threat they pose.

US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said during a press conference on Tuesday that “we take this very seriously and we will continue to investigate and turn over every rock until we find the source of this and the extent of it.”

Lloyd added that investigators have determined that the leaked documents came from reports dated Feb. 28 and March 1.

CIA Director William Burns said in a lecture on Tuesday that the incident was “deeply unfortunate” and remarked that “we need to learn lessons from that.” The CIA is the agency believed to have produced the documents that seem to be based on surveillance of Korea’s NSO.

As these remarks are the first made by high-ranking American officials since the leaks occurred, they’re taken as de facto acknowledgment that the leaked documents were mostly originals.

“There is no excuse for these kinds of documents to be in the public domain,” Kirby said, while Christopher Meagher, an aide to Austin, acknowledged that the leaked document had a similar format to the originals.

As a result, the US government is doing everything in its power to delete the documents that continue to circulate online.

Investigators believe the leaker was not an outsider from a country such as Russia but an insider — that is, someone inside the Department of Defense or the Joint Chiefs of Staff who would have been positioned to handle the intelligence reports in question. The theory that it was a Russian operation that was raised in the days after the initial reporting by the New York Times on Friday has been put on the back burner.

The reports weren’t acquired through hacking, but by someone who took pictures of physical copies stacked on top of a magazine. Considering that the documents in the photographs were crumpled, they appear to have been stuffed into someone’s pocket. It can also be inferred that the leaker didn’t have high enough security clearance to take the documents home.

But since there were hundreds of people in a position to view those documents, tracking down the leaker isn’t expected to be easy.

By Lee Bon-young, Washington correspondent

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