Airman, Arrested for Leaks, Chatted in Groups Fascinated by Weapons and War

Members of that small community, hosted on the social-media app Discord, admired President Vladimir Putin’s regime and its war on Ukraine. 

Airman Teixeira was arrested by federal agents in Dighton, Mass., on Thursday and charged in a Federal courthouse in Boston with unlawfully taking and sharing what appeared to be briefing materials for high-level civilian and military leaders. Charging documents tie him to his online community by using billing records from Discord and interviews with at least one other member of his online community. 

Those documents, however, revealed little about why the 21-year-old low-level analyst from a small town in Massachusetts allegedly stole and shared details of U.S. surveillance of adversaries and allies. The leak has set off diplomatic storms between the U.S. and its allies, and most acutely, has spilled into public view material that could undermine Ukraine’s fight against Russia.

Airman Teixeira’s life online offers a window into a particular subset of game culture, where trolling is common and the line between opinion and provocation blurred. That culture increasingly mirrors the wider U.S. political discourse where pundits and aspiring lawmakers have found fame and power in strategically deploying the profane, the offensive and the absurd—often in the form of a meme or a quick-witted online repartee.

As federal authorities began closing in, Airman Teixeira appears to have purged much of his online presence, but The Wall Street Journal attempted to reconstruct his activities from web archives. They reveal a young man with an intense interest in weapons and videogames—and the places where both converged. 

On the popular videogame platform Steam, he was in groups with names like “3rd Light Infantry Company” and “The Cobalt Brotherhood”—communities that brought people together where they could jointly play online games while at the same time trash-talking on voice-and-chat services like Discord. 

Handles associated with Airman Teixeira also had accounts on websites dedicated to collecting weapons and swapping tactical gear. From a young age, he nursed a fascination with history, especially the minutiae of weapons and armaments used in famous battles, a classmate recalled.

“He was just really into the whole, like, gun and war thing, more than, like, normal people were,” said Brooke Cleathero, 21, who said she attended history class with Airman Teixeira at Dighton-Rehoboth Regional High School. “He just wore a lot of camo.”

The case also shows the difficulty of keeping secrets online. Airman Teixeira allegedly shared the documents with a small group of associates in an invite-only space, according to the criminal complaint filed by the U.S. government. He first transcribed and later posted photographs of classified material in the Discord server “Thug Shaker Central,” itself an obscene and racist reference. The server was set up “to discuss geopolitical affairs and current and historical wars,” says the criminal complaint. 

But one of those online friends took the classified documents Airman Teixeira allegedly smuggled out and shared them with an even larger internet community, where they were eventually noticed by mainstream media outlets, Russian Telegram propaganda accounts and eventually federal authorities, who arrested Mr. Teixeira after a short investigation. 

The member of the Discord group who distributed the documents to a wider audience was a California teenager named Lucca Swinson. Mr. Swinson appears to have nursed an interest in the continuing war in Ukraine and the activities of Russian troops. 

On Feb. 3, a post on a Twitter account associated with Mr. Swinson, which has now been deleted, requested to buy combat patches of Wagner, the Russian paramilitary force notorious for extrajudicial executions, from a British YouTuber who had just returned from Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine.

The next day, a post from the Twitter account showed a screenshot from a video that had been released by Wagner-affiliated social media showing the execution of Ukrainian soldiers. 

Last month, another post added that he only likes Russia more than Ukraine because of its superior music. His SoundCloud account, viewed by the Journal, includes songs of the Russian proxy militia in the Donbas. 

Calls to numbers associated in public records with one of Mr. Swinson’s social-media accounts, and to his father, went unanswered. A woman at a residence in Southern California linked to his father said Mr. Swinson wasn’t home. 

Reached by phone, Mr. Swinson’s mother said she had no comment. 

In a tweet, another member of Thug Shaker, who went by the moniker Vahki, defended Mr. Swinson’s interest in military collectibles, describing him as antiwar. “He was just into collecting militaria and other gear goods,” wrote Vahki, a member who used a cartoon of a Russian soldier as the image for his avatar on Steam, a popular gamer community.

Tweets from both accounts are now no longer visible to the public. 

The original Discord channel inside Thug Shaker Central where Airman Teixeira allegedly leaked hundreds of classified documents was called “Bears vs Pigs,” a name that echoes Russian memes that depict Ukrainians as hapless pigs mauled by the mighty Russian bear.

Airman Teixeira appears to have scrubbed his social media clean in the anticipation of his arrest. 

The affinity for Mr. Putin, displayed by members of Airman Teixeira’s community, echoes the sympathies for Russia sometimes found in the populist strain of American conservatism, where Mr. Teixeira is now being viewed with sympathy. 

Almost immediately after Thursday’s arrest, Airman Teixeira was treated as a hero by several prominent members of the populist wing of American conservatism, where many have vocally supported Mr. Putin and criticized the Biden administration’s multibillion-dollar assistance to Ukraine. 

“He told the truth about troops being on the ground in Ukraine and a lot more,” tweeted Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.), who has campaigned to end aid to Ukraine.

“A 21-year-old gamer might have just prevented WWIII,” posted Jack Posobiec, a former Navy intelligence officer who promoted the Pizzagate conspiracy theory that led to the QAnon movement.

Top Republicans in Congress took a different view. House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Michael McCaul (R., Texas) has called the leaks “a serious breach of U.S. national security” and praised authorities for the arrest.

—Daniella Cheslow, Till Daldrup and Alicia Caldwell contributed to this article.

Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at [email protected], Shane Shifflett at [email protected], Byron Tau at [email protected] and Lisa Schwartz at [email protected]