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Locals living close to the sprawling military base in Cape Cod where 21-year-old Jack Teixeira worked for a US air force intelligence unit have been asking the same questions as everyone else.
Was his alleged leak of national security documents some kind of principled stand or an immature attempt to impress two dozen members of a closed chat group called Thug Shaker Central on Discord, a video game chat platform, that he lost control of?
And why did the Massachusetts air national guardsman have such apparently wide access anyway, from details of Ukrainian military vulnerabilities to surveillance of US allies – something which President Biden has called for an investigation into.
At a veterans club in Falmouth, 10 miles (16km) from Otis, better known as the Cape Cod joint airbase, where Teixeira worked, locals shared some of their opinions after Teixeira’s appearance in court on Friday charged with the unauthorized removal and retention of classified and national defense information.
“Should never have happened,” said retired service member Aaron Antone. He reasoned that it wasn’t surprising that Teixeira was so young – after all, the Navy has equally young recruits working on nuclear submarines.
But the bartender, who said his name was Joe, said it had exposed the media: “They’re saying ‘Ukraine’s winning, everything’s great’ and the documents are saying Russia is winning.” The US’s conflicts, he said, hadn’t been worthwhile since the second world war.
This is a view that has been put forward on the right, with Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, a member of the homeland security committee, defending Teixeira on Twitter for being “white, male, Christian and antiwar.” She went on: “That makes him an enemy to the Biden regime. And he told the truth about troops being on the ground in Ukraine and a lot more.”
The South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, a fellow Republican, slammed Greene’s comment on Sunday, calling it “one of the most irresponsible statements you could make”.
“There is no justification for this, and for any member of Congress to suggest it’s OK to leak classified information because you agree with the cause is terribly irresponsible and puts America in serious danger,” Graham said on ABC’s This Week.
Teixeira worked at the Otis air national guard base on night shifts as a cyber transports systems journeyman – similar to an information technology specialist – in the 102nd intelligence wing since May last year.
Teixeira’s stepfather and stepbrother appear to have worked at the full scale, joint-use base that is home to five military commands, including the air force’s 101st intelligence squadron, the intelligence unit assigned to the wing Teixeira worked for, and the only land-based radar site providing intercontinental and ballistic missile warning for the eastern coast of the US and southern Canada.
The 102nd intelligence wing lists its mission as providing “worldwide precision intelligence and command and control” alongside surveillance and reconnaissance operations, cryptologic intelligence and cyber engineering.
Beyond that, the base serves a variety of purposes: Venezuelans migrants flown to Martha’s Vineyard last year by Florida governor Ron DeSantis are housed here; unarmed F-15s were scrambled from here to intercept hijacked commercial jets that crashed into the twin towers in 2001.
The background to the base being a hub for intelligence signals is for reasons likely related to the cold war, when it was a key aerospace defense command installation.
There are units at the base which process intelligence collected from drones and spy planes, the New York Times has reported, but the leaks, reported to stretch to 300 pages of photographed material, have gone well beyond this.
“Why someone of quite low level would have a legitimate reason for access to what [signals intelligence] says about South Korean leaders’ reactions to the war when you’d think he’d only have access to battlefield intelligence seems way off-piste,” says Calder Walton, assistant director of the Intelligence Project at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and author of Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West, to be published next month.
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One explanation may be found in the reshaping of intelligence agencies’ access after 9/11, which was largely blamed on the failure to share information among agencies and branches that added together could have exposed the al-Qaida plot before it was enacted.
“There’s was a huge pendulum shift from need-to-know to need-to-share,” says Walton. More than a decade later, Edward Snowden exposed the failures of that approach and leaked information about how intelligence was collected before fleeing to Russia.
“Snowden was an illustration of the need-to-share problems of one person having access to a kaleidoscope of intelligence. To prevent further unauthorized disclosures the [National Security Agency] said there would be greater restrictions on who had access. But did that happen within the broader Department of Defense? Evidently not. It looks like a striking failure to learn lessons.”
The extraordinary reaction to the leaks, he adds, is also striking, revealing often conflicting currents of antigovernment thought. “Twenty years ago the liberal-left commentary would have been ‘Let’s see and understand why he or she did it,’ and the right would have been ‘Hang him high,” Walton says. “Now it’s the opposite. The right is saying he’s exposed the deep state and lies about Ukraine.”
That same division can be found across the state. Ukrainian flags are festooned around Harvard; 40 miles (64km) south in Dighton, a part agricultural, part suburban area where Teixeira lived with his mother, they are absent.
Support among the American public for providing Ukraine weaponry and direct economic assistance has softened, according to a poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research in February on the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion.
In May 2022, less than three months into the war, 60% of US adults said they were in favor of sending Ukraine weapons. That figure has dropped to 48%, according to the poll. “What Marjorie Taylor Greene and others are saying is representing a wider trend of thought,” Walton said.
At the veterans club in Falmouth, one Vietnam-era vet who told the Guardian his name was Bruce said: “We thought at first that Trump had released the documents because of the [Manhattan accounting] indictment. But it’s very shocking that it should have come out of Otis.”
Another local, Rick Olsen, referred back to Daniel Ellsberg and the 1971 leak of the Pentagon Papers to the Washington Post. “Ellsberg stood up for his principles, then you had Edward Snowden … If he believed in what he’d done he would have stayed here, faced the consequences like Ellsberg, not run away to Putin.”
Teixeira, by contrast, “is a little kid who is trying to be important”, Olsen said.
“It’s not that what he’s done is any worse. But as liberal, if I had something that was worth standing up for, I’d accept the consequences of doing that. It’s shocking but not surprising this should happen here. Otis is a major military installation, with combined forces there. What this kid is alleged to have done he did out of hubris, but it doesn’t change what he did. We still have a lot to learn.”
English (US)