U.S. national security agencies and the Justice  

Department are scrambling to  determine the source, scale,  

and sensitivity of what appears to be the most  serious spillage of U.S. intelligence in years.

The documents appear to contain information  on everything from the war in Ukraine to North  

Korea's weapons programme...and  France's relations with Africa.

[Thomas Rid, Professor, Johns  Hopkins University] "...safe  

to say, this is one of the most damaging  intelligence leaks this century so far."

Let's take a closer look at  some of the key revelations:

The most sensitive content is what appears to be  operational information about the war in Ukraine,

including details about the country's  air defense vulnerabilities.

There are also predictions about how China would  respond to Ukrainian strikes inside Russia....

as well as details of a purported  internal discussion among South  

Korean officials about pressure from the U.S.  on Seoul to help supply weapons to Ukraine.

Aside from the Ukraine war, there's information  

about Iran's nuclear capabilities  and North Korea's missile tests.

France's security goals in west and  central Africa also come under scrutiny,  

with an assessment that that they will not be met.

[Rid] "About 20 pages are serial intelligence  reports produced by different agencies. A serial  

report is a one paragraph concise reporting  on a specific issue in a specific country.  

The other 20 some pages are maps  and war updates from Ukraine."

Are the documents real and how were they leaked?

Pictures of creased documents were  posted on platforms across the Internet,  

including Discord, 4Chan, Telegram and Twitter.

U.S. officials believe most  of the material is genuine.

Some, however, appear to have been  altered to show inflated U.S. estimates  

for Ukrainian battlefield casualties, as well  as understated numbers for Russian forces.

[Rid]"It appears that whoever had access to the  files had them in print form, because otherwise,  

why would you take pictures of them  and then distribute the pictures?  

And so that means we could simply be looking at,  we have to include very mundane explanations,  

like somebody could have literally lost  a bag of classified documents or somebody  

could have had access to that suitcase  in some car, you know, whatever it was.  

So there could be some very unusual explanations  for what it is. After all, a very unusual,  

you know, leak or spillage of information here."

The open source investigation site Bellingcat  said it had found evidence that the documents

– or at least some of them – had appeared on  social media as far back as March or even January.