Finding the Pentagon Leak Suspect

The murky digital trail began with four items sent to a Russian channel on the Telegram messaging app, each of which included a photo of a classified US intelligence report. Aric Toler, a freelance journalist working with us, noticed that some of the same documents had been posted elsewhere and realized that the source of the leak must be somewhere other than Telegram. But he couldn’t find it.

“I looked and saw,” said Aric.

Then there is the entry tip. Someone sent a message that the same material appeared in the Discord chat application, in a channel dedicated to maps for the Minecraft video game. Aric finds 10 documents there and contacts the host.

The host insists that he is not the leaker and sounds scared. Like many of the people Aric met on his quest, the host also looked like a teenager. He explained that he got the document from a chat group called wow_mao on Discord. There, a user named Lucca has posted more than 100 images of the leaked documents.

Aric then start livetweeting research process, and people send private messages. They eventually learned that Lucca was part of another chat group – called Thug Shaker Central – where hundreds of documents appeared to have been uploaded. But Thug Shaker Central is gone, deleted by users when the leak went public.

At this point, a former member of Thug Shaker with the username Vakhi contacted Aric. Lucca is not the original leak, says Vakhi, who is 17 years old. There is someone called OG.

Granite hints

Two other Visual Investigation journalists – Christiaan Triebert and Malachy Browne – joined the effort. Working with Aric, they heard from Vakhi that OG had started sending documents to Thug Shaker last fall. OG worked at a military facility, Vakhi said, and the two had played video games together.

Search for OG “Thug Shaker is missing, and his friends refuse to identify OG, but we have enough information to know who he is,” Malachy said. “We look at the games that are played online, the ones that are played and connect the dots.”

On Steam, an app that sells video games and connects users with other players, reporters are looking for Vakhi’s account and the people it connects with. Aric uses a special site that scrapes and indexes Steam user data, so he can see usernames associated with Vakhi and his contacts. The team thinks that one of the people Vakhi has been in contact with might be the OG

The reporter found the man, with the real username jackdjdtex. In his account, he found a picture from a video game that identified the player as J Teixeira.

The reporter then scoured Flickr, Instagram and other parts of the web for this mysterious man. They found one photo of Jack Teixeira in military uniform, another of him smiling in the woods and another of his childhood home kitchen – standing near a brown-and-white-speckled granite countertop.

On Wednesday, Christiaan and Malachy spoke to other Discord members who had downloaded a new trove of 27 photos of leaked documents. In some people, Christiaan and another member of our team, Riley Mellen, noticed that the surface on which the documents were sitting while taking photos. It’s a brown-white kitchen countertop.

There, Haley Willis, another member of our team, and two colleagues arrived before dawn at Teixeira’s home in North Dighton, Mass. “We saw that we believe it could have been Jack driving into the driveway,” she said. “He saw us, we saw him and his car froze for a moment on the road.”

They approached the house. Jack’s stepfather, Thomas Dufault, a retired Air Force master sergeant, was there. Haley asks if she can talk to Jack. “He will not communicate with anyone except his attorney at this time,” the stepfather said. Soon, a plane circled overhead. It was clear that the authority was already in him.

Back in New York, we published an investigation. Later that morning, a SWAT team arrived at a home in Massachusetts.

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