America’s latest intel leak is more Jim Carrey than James Bond

It’s like the plot of a John le Carre novel, if spymaster George Smiley’s people were a clique of confused, pimple-faced gamers. Or James Bond, if 007 were a peach-fuzz-faced lad asked by the bartender for proof of age every time he ordered his vesper martini.

“Shaken, not stirred.”

“Er, how about an apple juice instead, son?”

This week came the revelation that America’s latest intelligence breach was not the work of a crafty Russian mole seeking to undermine the US, nor even a wannabe do-gooder hoping to strike a blow against the abuses of America’s deep state. He was Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guard IT specialist who leaked documents to impress his buddies – a couple of dozen young video game and gun aficionados on an online message board.

The fiasco lays bare the absurdity of the US national security state. Vast, overlapping bureaucracies go to extreme lengths to spy on the world and safeguard their trove of secrets. The US spent at least $90bn (£72bn) last year on its various complexes of intelligence agencies, as well as $10bn (£8bn) on the FBI, which includes a counterintelligence budget. That’s more than the entire GDP of a small country like Lebanon.

That this edifice was cracked by the ringleader of “Thug Shaker Central”, a band of teens and young men named after a somewhat risque dance move, dispels much of the mystique surrounding the 18 organisations that make up the US intelligence community.

“I really am baffled that such a young and low-ranking airman could have access to the kinds of classified documents that he did,” says Colin P Clarke, research director at the Soufan Group, a private risk management and consultancy firm founded by Ali Soufan, the FBI agent who hunted Osama bin Laden. “It’s unclear to me why he would need access to documents speaking about Egypt sending rockets to Russia, or what the US was saying to Israel’s Mossad. Or most importantly, tactical and operational details of the war in Ukraine.”

Though the entire episode sounds like a Coen Brothers tragicomedy, complete with a guy being arrested at the home of his mom, it touches on far darker trends.

Teixeira’s motives were not entirely apolitical. He seems to be angry at the US and the “establishment” and “wokeness” in the toxic style of the contemporary American right. He has already been adopted as a hero by right-wing political operatives such as Tucker Carlson.

The intelligence services are supposed to ferret out characters like Teixeira with batteries of tests and background checks. Yet Teixeira obtained security clearance despite being a gun nut who spewed racist and antisemitic bile on videos posted online.

More likely than not, Teixeira avoided scrutiny because his ideas and attitudes jibe with the broader national security establishment.

“The strange thing about the US government is that the military will move heaven and earth to chase down one terrorist in a dark corner of the world,” says Clarke. “But when it comes to a 21-year-old gamer nerd with access to some of the world’s most important secrets, all he needs to do is take a one-hour online training annually about how to handle classified information.”

Adding insult to the US national security establishment’s injury, those who quickly tracked down Teixeira were not some FBI counterintelligence sleuths in aviator sunglasses or uniformed Pentagon investigators, but the nerdy open-source investigators and reporters at the platform Bellingcat and other news outlets.

They found him not by using intrusive spying software to crack into phones, but by matching the patterns on the upholstery in Teixeira’s selfies to the background on some leaked photos of classified documents. Instead of waterboarding his accomplices, reporters befriended his lonely online pals and convinced them to spill the beans.

Needless to say, US allies are unimpressed with the appalling tradecraft. “The US government should seriously reflect on the terrible situation resulting from its inadequate management of classified information and take remedial measures quickly,” Japan’s top-tier Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper wrote in an editorial.

Adding to the embarrassment, the documents were circulating online for weeks before US officials even realised they had been leaked. The delay gave nefarious disinformation operatives time to edit and further weaponise the leaks.

Over the decades the US intelligence establishment has become bigger, more secretive, and more arrogant. For decades journalists and researchers have run up against increasingly formidable brick walls of secrecy whenever they are seeking to reveal America’s actions abroad. The government has become obsessed with secrecy, with officials across the bureaucracy labelling their research and communications “classified” just to hype their importance.

In fact, despite the hype, there appeared to be very little information leaked that was all that explosive. Sources and methods are sensitive, but a lot of the supposed state secrets revealed in the latest leaks were hardly revelatory. The Ukraine war is not going well? Stop the presses. Many of the leaks did not appear too different from reports issued by think tanks.

I have been given the cold shoulder by secretive US intelligence and paramilitary officials across the Middle East and North Africa for more than 20 years. My emails are ignored. My requests for briefings unanswered. Information act requests are rejected. I was hounded away in northeast Syria when I asked for a chat with US personnel helping the fight against Isis. I was brushed off in Afghanistan when I knocked at the gate of a US compound outside Herat and asked for a little information about what was going on in that corner of the country.

“We don’t give out information,” said the American guy in wraparound shades who drove up to tell me to get lost. “Not even to ourselves.”

Perhaps the key to uncovering America’s most precious secrets is not to graduate with a journalism degree, work sources on the phone and knock on doors, but to join a group of teenagers on a messaging board trading tips about guns and video games.