British lives at risk over US intelligence leak, MPs warn

The Pentagon, which also has not confirmed the authenticity of the documents, has been forced to respond to the drip-feed of embarrassing revelations and has launched an international manhunt for the leaker.

William Burns, the director of the CIA, admitted the leaks had been “deeply unfortunate” while Lloyd Austin, the US defence secretary, vowed to “turn over every rock” in the search for the perpetrator.

The leaks have damaged America’s relationship with countries ranging from South Korea to Egypt, while the latest revelations have suggested that Serbia has been secretly arming Ukraine, even though the Balkan country is regarded by Russia as one of Moscow’s closest European allies.

The documents suggest the UK has the most number of special forces operatives deployed in Ukraine of any Nato country

Russia has denied being the source of the leaks and accused the US of publishing them as part of a disinformation campaign. Oleksii Reznikov, the Ukrainian defence minister, said the leaks were a deliberate attempt to sow discord among Kyiv’s allies. “It’s a mix of truth and falsehoods,” he said.

Whitehall officials, the military and intelligence agencies are now bracing themselves for the release of more information after the alleged strength of British special forces in Ukraine was published online. According to the leaks, Nato has 97 elite troops in Ukraine in total.

“The Pentagon itself does not know what else is still to come out,” a security source told The Times. “It is really worrying and there may be more disclosures before they manage to shut this down.”

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The best known special forces regiments in the British military are the SAS and the SBS. The UK also has special-operations capable forces, including the Royal Marines and the Rangers, a regiment founded in 2021.

Last year, The Times revealed that marines from the 45 Commando Group had been deployed to Ukraine to take part in “discreet operations” that carried a “high level of political and military risk”.

Tobias Ellwood, who chairs the defence select committee, said the US leaks could “endanger lives”.

“Given our long-established lead in scale and capability when it comes to elite forces it will come as no surprise that our special forces are doing much of the heavy lifting,” he said.

The Ministry of Defence has said the leaks contain “a serious level of inaccuracy”

“But this deliberate large-scale disclosure of sensitive material could easily endanger lives and should prompt an urgent review about who has access to sensitive information and how it is shared.”

Dan Jarvis, the Labour MP for Barnsley Central and a former special forces commander in Afghanistan, said the operations were “by necessity shrouded in secrecy”.

He added: “Any compromise of secret material regarding their deployment or numerical strength is not only politically embarrassing but also militarily disadvantageous. It risks jeopardising the security and effectiveness of those operations and could put lives at risk.”

Philip Ingram, a former military intelligence officer, said it was a “hugely dangerous leak”, adding: “Until they have identified where it has come from and how the information got out there, it’s extremely concerning because there could be more. This is top secret material whose release will cause grave damage to the US, military operations abroad and politically.”

Ingram said that it risked damaging the intelligence relationship between the US and its key allies because they had trusted it with insecure information.

Among the leaks circulating online was a list of names, which could not be authenticated, purporting to be of CIA intelligence operatives working in Ukraine.

Ingram cast doubt on the legitimacy of the list as information about such assets would be subject to much higher classification levels than the other leaked material. However, he said it was a “very dangerous” move whether accurate or not. If the list referred to real individuals, it placed them at risk by simply alleging they were working for US intelligence, he added.

He also warned there was a great deal of disinformation being circulated online concerning the leaks.

YouTuber denies role in leak

In a bizarre twist, a 20-year old British student who goes by the name of “Wow Mao” has been forced to deny that he was the origin of the leak in a video this week. The British-Filipino YouTuber has acknowledged that a server he ran on Discord, a social media platform, was among the first places the documents appeared online – a fact he described as “hilarious” – but he insisted the original leak came from elsewhere.

The university student, whose identity has not been disclosed, describes himself as a “shitposting internet micro-celebrity”and runs a community on the messaging platform Discord, where the documents appeared in early March.

“We’re definitely not at the centre of this leak. But my server was how a lot of people saw those documents for the first time,” he said in a video posted on YouTube on Monday. “I’m just a roadblock the CIA had to go through in the trail to find who leaked this stuff.”

Wow Mao said he regretted not moderating his server “a little bit more”

Relatively unknown Discord users now find themselves involved in an international US-led manhunt for the source of the leaks. In a video responding to the controversy, Wow Mao openly addressed the leaks with a plea that he should avoid jail. He said he was just “a shitposting internet microcelebrity and I’d like to keep it that”.

Wow Mao told The New York Times he was a dual British-Filipino citizen and said it was “hilarious” the documents had appeared on his Discord server; each server is a community with different group chats, known as channels.

He said he mostly concentrated on his YouTube channel, which has about 250,000 subscribers. “I’ve just let a bunch of children run wild,” he said. “I do regret, maybe, not moderating my server just a little bit more.”

An investigation by Bellingcat traced the leaks to the Discord server run by Wow Mao. The documents were posted on the server on March 1 and March 2 by a user called MrLucca, although the files may have appeared beforehand on another since-deleted server called Thug Shaker Central.

Wow Mao said the number of members subscribing to his server had increased from 4,000 to 7,000 following the Bellingcat investigation. “Any publicity’s good publicity, I guess, as long as I don’t land in prison,” he said.