A CNN report stated the problem and the seriousness of it:
"The Biden administration is scrambling to assess and contain the fallout from a major leak of classified Pentagon documents that has rattled US officials, members of Congress and key allies in recent days.
The Justice Department is investigating how the trove of highly sensitive documents, which include details about how the US spies on friends and foes as well as intelligence on the war in Ukraine, ended up on social media sites.
But, to date, little is known about who may have been responsible for the leak or how some of the nation’s most tightly guarded secrets ended up on social media sites."
Back when the earth was still warm I was the chief of staff to the Majority Floor Leader in a state House of Representatives. The second most important person in the place, the Leader is the organizer of his party´s caucus - in this case, the Democrats.
We knew that one of our 34 caucus members was feeding information to the Republicans. Who was he/she? We needed to answer that question - and fast.
We cooked up a plan:
We passed out the results of a statewise public opinion poll I ran on hot issues, such as abortion, to each member as they entered the closed caucus room. Each copy had a small difference; you had to know what to look for to see it.
But how could we know which member received which copy? They were handed out hurridly at the doorway by one of my employees, a university student. Impossible, no?
Answer: Unknown to everyone but me she was (i) an Evelyn Wood speed reader graduate with (ii) a photographic memory. After the deed was done, we made a list of who received what.
Sure enough, the Republican caucus distributed our poll results to its members the following day.
They had their spy; we had ours. I obtained a copy of their handout and looked for the identifying individual mark. Presto - we had our man.
We did not jump up and down, scream and shout at him. On the contrary, we pretended that everything was normal. For the next month I fed him bogus information with a sprinkling of items that were true but unimportant.
The Republicans learned the hard way that he was unreliable, and had even less use for him than we did. Dismissed by them, despised by us, he fell through the cracks.
Deciding that cowardice was the better part of valor, he did not run for re-election.