Jack Teixeira’s Polish (or Croatian) Missile
To support a supplemental bid to keep Jack Teixeira jailed pre-trial, prosecutors provided proof that on three instances, the young enlisted man had been caught improperly accessing classified information. Even after formal warnings on September 15 and October 27, 2022, on January 30 of this year, a female Master Sergeant observed Teixeira “viewing content that was not related to his primary duty.”
Days later, amid a discussion of “fed cars sneaking around,” Teixeira fantasized about making an “assassination van.”
Nevertheless, even after three chances to stop all this, Teixeira was still actively stealing classified information for over a month after that, and as an earlier filing laid out, he offered to take requests about “happenings that pertain to your country” after that.
TEIXEIRA: Like to thank everyone who came to the thread about the current event, going on and participated and listen to me, cover set event since it’s beginning, I was very happy and willing and enthusiastic to have covered this event for the past year and share with all of you something that not many people get to see something very few people in fact, get to see, but despite all of this, I’ve decided to stop with the updates
TEIXEIRA: If you guys do you want happenings that pertain to your country or events or politics or whatever you can DM me and I can tell you what I have, but it’s going to always be a brief summary
TEIXEIRA: I can’t promise, speed or prompt response, but I will respond to you eventually so offers on the table. If you want to take it until then I’ll still be sticking around here still be posting shit, so not going anywhere don’t worry about that.
I suspect the non-response to these three incidents may be one reason the Commanding Officers of this base have been temporarily suspended and the entire unit stripped of its intelligence mission.
But the more important supplement for Teixeira’s ultimate fate may be this exchange from November 15.
Teixeira: I remember reading that on a TS network
…
Teixeira: I work in airforce intel
…
User: Would have been nice
User: If you alerted us that a drone was heading to crash in the middle of a suburb of our capital?
Teixeira: We did
Teixeira: Just not that simple
User: Official government statement was nobody said shit
User: And nobody saw it
Teixeira: Yeah I expect that to be the official statement
Teixeira: My gov would have done the same downplay strategy
User: What is a ts network
Teixeira: Top secret
…
Teixeira: Like SCI noforn, hcs
…
User: What is being said now about this loose ukrainian missile?
Teixeira: I mean I’m hoping to get back to work in the next week rn I have covid
Teixeira: When I do get back however I will let u know
This exchange may be a response to this incident from the same day, when a Ukrainian air defense missile attempting to shoot down an incoming Russian attack went astray and killed two Poles (though Przewodów is nowhere near Warsaw).
If that’s right, by extrapolation this interlocutor must be have been presenting as a Pole. After Teixeira stated that he worked in Air Force intel with access to a Top Secret network, his interlocutor elicited information, challenged Teixeira’s response, then probed how much access Teixeira really had. Teixeira responded by telling someone presenting as a citizen of a NATO ally that he had access to compartmented information and HUMINT. Then the supposed Pole asked for more information.
And Teixeira agreed to get it for him.
Perhaps this presumed Pole was just shooting the shit in a gamer chat room. Or perhaps this guy was something else, someone with the training to know how to coax someone into greater and greater compromise.
Perhaps there were others in the chat room who saw all this go down and exploited the situation accordingly.
This filing, as the earlier one also did, specifies that these chats do not reflect the full extent of Special Agent Luke Church’s knowledge of the situation.
The interactions described above do not reflect all my knowledge on this matter or all relevant, inculpatory, or violent messages that I observed. They are instead offered to provide the Court with representative sample of certain messages attributable to TEIXEIRA.
Church might well be withholding the full context of these exchanges, too, perhaps withholding what happened after Teixeira went back to work after recovering from COVID.
Thus far, DOJ’s filings speak just of the existing charges against Teixeira, 18 USC 793(b) and (d). But this willful sharing of HUMINT with foreigners soliciting it — whether they really are citizens of a NATO ally or something else — gets a closer to espionage, an 18 USC 794 violation of the sort that can carry life imprisonment.
Update: dc-turtle suggests the drone could have been in Croatia, not Poland (which I’ve added to the title). It would still amount to Teixeira sharing information with someone presenting as a citizen of a NATO ally.
It’s hard to believe that no one cracked down on Teixera after the *first* time he was caught in files he shouldn’t have had access to.
I’m afraid that this is the norm. I knew someone from Army Intel who did damage assessments as part of their “other duties”. Right after Comey declined to charge Clinton, I asked their opinion. They said that “you wouldn’t believe the sh#t that goes on”. They explained that in almost all cases they had investigated, there were prior incidents of mishandling of classified information, sufficient to lose their access, that were ignored by their bosses.
Military organizations tend to be part bureaucracy and part fraternity. There are often temptations for leaders to paper over problems, particularly ones that would raise questions about the organization and its leadership.
It’s not hard to believe when you think about it. Since the elimination of the draft the armed forces have been deconstructed and then reconstructed to allow for selection of the most vulnerable to this kind of brainwashing. In particular, the Air Force command structure beginning with the Air Force Academy has been exposed as a hot bed of neo-Nazi ideology since the Clinton administration.
In spite of countless examples of capricious petty tyrants in middle management, it’s more common to find “leaders” who are incapable of handling problematic employees. Either through inexperience, apathy, or simply lacking the stomach to have honest-but-difficult conversations.
I’m a bit surprised, but not shocked I guess that this dynamic would present itself in a military intelligence context. Assuming Teixeira is convicted, he deserves whatever is coming to him but the COs bear the brunt of the responsibility for the overall intelligence failure. Whatever shortcomings there are in an individual staff member or the information systems they are accessing, it’s the COs job to recognize those risks and mitigate them.
This is why I think the DOJ in the Mar-a-leako case is spending so much time. Might be trying to prove a 794 then offer a plea to 793.
794 also includes the death penalty, but i think Teixeira was going for more clout then purposely finding foreigners to share info with
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User mentions “drone” and suburb of capital. This may actually be regarding the drone that crashed near Zagreb in Croatia in March 2022. https://www.foxnews.com/world/stray-drone-ukrainian-war-crashes-croatia-carrying-bomb
Note name changed from dc to comport with site rules.
Thank you for the name update! – bmaz
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That reads like a summary of numerous training sessions I’ve been subjected to: what not to do, what to look for in others. Textbook. I suspect Mr Teixeira and his military superiors will feature in future security training.
Zirc
“I suspect Mr. Teixeira and his military superiors will feature in future security training”
What makes you suspect that?
What makes you think otherwise?
The experience of being in the military
Because the regular training I receive includes recent examples of offenses and breaches. What Tezeira did and what his superiors didn’t do are, as I say, textbook examples of behavior to avoid and look for.
Zirc
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I suspect the Polish missile refers to the potentially adverse impact of this classified information on Polish-Ukrainian relations, and the fact that Teixeira was doing this raises chilling questions about what else he revealed.
I think it’s important to remember what can come from the improper disclosure of NDI. In 1943, Congressman May of Kentucky told the press, who duly reported same, that the Japanese anti-submarine warfare efforts were unsuccessful because they were setting the detonation points on their depth charges too shallow. The Japanese switched tactics. Submarine commander Admiral Lockwood believed that May’s disclosure resulted in the subsequent loss of 10 USN submarines and 800 lives.
Loose Lips Sink Ships
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_J._May
The drone that crashed in Croatia in March 2022 was an ex-Soviet TU-141.
Mark Felton has a video on this incident:
https://youtu.be/5pVh1HRRHM0
How many times does a Master Sargeant have to complain about breaches of intelligence security before the Airforce will act to rein in the breaches? Seriously, three complaints and this guy was still at it? Kudos to the Sargeant for making the complaints. One wonders how many observed breaches of security were happening that less brave souls didn’t even bother to report…given the obvious lack of seriousness that the commanding officers in that Intelligence Wing appeared to be taking with the nation’s security.
She (the master sergeant) might be the only person who comes out of this with an intact career.
It does also make you wonder if gender bias played a role in the CO underrating the Master Sargeant’s concerns.