FBI's Intimidating Visit on Discord Leak Story

FBI agents told former Army officer to delete months-old SpyTalk story he posted on LinkedIn

Paul Cobaugh, a 66-year-old former U.S. Army information warfare expert, has spent much of his retirement years writing books about political warfare and posting articles by others that he likes on LinkedIn.

This week the FBI took notice of one of those articles Cobaugh posted back in April. Agents from the bureau’s office in San Antonio, where Cobaugh lives, visited the veteran at his home on Wednesday and asked him to delete an article he had posted last April about the so-called Discord leaks, the massive trove of highly classified documents that a low level Air Force National Guard enlisted man has been charged with stealing and posting on social media.

Just one of the scores of Discord leaks belatedly discovered circling the globe

The article in question, “On That DoD Intelligence Leak Shocker,” was written by me and published here at SpyTalk on April 10.  Like other news organizations writing about the leaks over the following weeks and months, the article included a photographic sample of one of the scores of classified documents allegedly stolen and circulated widely by Airman 1st class Jack Teixeira. 

When the FBI agents visited Cobaugh on Aug. 9 he was working with a headset on in his home office—he’s vice president of Narrative Strategies, a U.S.based think tank and consultancy specializing in “the non-kinetic aspects of conflict”—and his wife was in the back yard, so they didn't hear the doorbell. Not getting a response,  one of the agents left his card in the front door with a message scribbled on the back asking Cobaugh to call him.

He did, and the agents returned. The lead agent (whom SpyTalk is not naming now at the FBI’s request) asked Cobaugh if he had a LinkedIn account. “They said they believed that I may have posted something that had a classified marking on it,” Cobaugh told me. The agent asked Cobaugh to “take it down.” 

He says he willingly complied.

“I gave him my phone and said, ‘Here, you find it—you know better how  to look for it than me.’  So I gave him my phone. I don't have anything to hide.”

The FBI agent also asked Cobaugh if he could examine his phone for replicas of other classified documents. Again, Cobaugh, who held high level security clearances throughout his Army career and later as a contractor, quickly complied. 

After the agents left, he called us.

SpyTalk reached out to the agent, who readily confirmed the visit and Cobaugh’s account. 

“That was what it was about—taking it off the Internet,” he said.

I asked him whether the FBI was reaching out to everyone who had re-posted photos of the Discord  leaks and asking them to take them down.  

“That’s correct,” he said.  It was a project of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program.