Pentagon Admits to Having WikiLeaks War Room as it Readies for New Document Dump

As WikiLeaks prepares a new dump of secret war documents, the feds’ intel SWAT team races to do damage control. Philip Shenon reports on its leader and its inner workings.

In a nondescript suite of government offices not far from the Pentagon, nearly 120 intelligence analysts, FBI agents, and others are at work—24 hours a day, seven days a week—on the frontlines of the government’s secret war against WikiLeaks.

Dubbed the WikiLeaks War Room by some of its occupants, the round-the-clock operation is on high alert this month as WikiLeaks and its elusive leader, Julian Assange, threaten to release a second batch of thousands of classified American war logs from Afghanstan. Thousands more leaked documents from another American war zone—Iraq—are also reportedly slated for release by WikiLeaks this fall.

“I do not have time to correct all the lies and distortions that are issued each day by the tabloid press and others who should know better,” Assange said in an email.



Although outsiders have not been allowed to inspect the “war room” in suburban Virginia and see its staff at work, national-security officials offered details of the operation to The Daily Beast, including the identity of the counterintelligence expert who has been put in charge: Brig. General Robert A. Carr of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Officials say Carr, handpicked for the assignment by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, is highly respected among his colleagues at DIA, the Pentagon’s equivalent of the CIA, and a fitting adversary to Assange, the nomadic Australian-born computer hacker who founded WikiLeaks and is now believed to be in Sweden.

“I wouldn’t want to go up against General Carr,” a Pentagon official said. “Very smart guy.” Carr served in Afghanistan for much of last year before his transfer to the DIA in Washington, where he runs the Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center. In his battle against Assange, officials say, Carr’s central assignment is to try to determine exactly what classified information might have been leaked to WikiLeaks, and then to predict whether its disclosure could endanger American troops in the battlefield, as well as what larger risk it might pose to American foreign policy.

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