The scale of this security breach was really unprecedented.
Admiral Mike Mullen said over the weekend
that the United States has never been this close to nuclear war.
Do you agree with him?
Yeah. I do.
There are nuclear weapons in Europe.
They're not being kept safely.
They’re in Italy, and they’re in Germany
and Netherlands and Belgium.
The only tool that it really took to discover this
was a Google search.
I came across these flashcard websites.
The users had foolishly uploaded incredibly sensitive stuff to it
without checking the privacy settings.
The more I delved into,
the more and more flashcards popped up with information
that seemed very, very secretive to me.
There’s, like, one thread, and you pull at it,
and then the whole tapestry kind of unravels.
One of the results that I came across
was a Facebook page by a US service member
who had posted a picture of his entire squadron.
Showed some people next to a bomb.
And you know, the mind races, doesn’t it?
Who are these people? What is the bomb? Is it live?
My immediate reaction was,
“Oh shit, this is something big.”
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I’m Foeke Postma,
and I’m an investigator for Bellingcat.
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Hello. My name is Maxim Edwards, and I’m an editor at Bellingcat.
This morning, as the Ukrainian capital’s attacked again,
NATO kicks off nuclear training exercises in Europe.
One of the topics here in the Netherlands
is the American nuclear weapons that are stationed here.
The presence of US nuclear weapons throughout Europe
is a “public secret,”
but everybody sort of knows that they are here.
And that really annoys me.
They don’t confirm or deny
the location of nuclear weapons at specific bases.
They said numerous times the Cold War is over.
This idea simply is not true.
The nuclear weapons that exist today are immensely more powerful
than those that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And that makes it only more important
that we know what’s at stake.
And that’s why I wanted to investigate this.
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One thing you do as an investigator
is to learn the language of the subject you’re investigating.
And so, my very first step was to go into a Wikipedia article
about the military airbase here in the Netherlands
where these nuclear weapons were stored
and learn certain terminology.
And I had this list of terms that I knew these people were using.
I simply went to Google
and combined them with Volkel, the name of the Dutch airbase.
And almost immediately,
I came across these flashcard websites.
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Soldiers have to learn a lot in order to effectively do your job,
meaning that they will also look for ways that help them study.
So imagine you’re are using a physical flashcard, right?
You write a question on one side, write the answer on the other one.
Most of these apps also sync to websites
because they want other people to find your study material.
They were online in the public domain
because they'd been uploaded to these flashcard apps,
which in their default settings make your flashcards public.
So that’s why they’re so simple but so durable,
because anyone can use them as a kind of memory aid.
But very quickly, it delved into very specific knowledge
that wasn’t meant to be public.
One of the terms was PAS, protective aircraft shelter,
which protects the aircraft that carry the nuclear weapons.
Below those shelters are vaults, WS3,
weapons security storage systems [sic].
This is the system that actually contains the nuclear weapon itself.
And the users had foolishly uploaded incredibly sensitive stuff to it
without checking the privacy settings.
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One of the first, most interesting cards that I saw
was the question,
“How many vaults are there at Volkel?”
And the answer was 11.
Now, this is not meant to be public knowledge.
In the process of searching for stuff,
he came across more and more and more and more of them.
Now, one of these sets, for example, could contain up to 70 flashcards,
all of them containing questions
that were answered with sensitive information.
What happens when an alarm goes off?
How many people show up?
What kind of weapons do they carry?
I couldn’t really at first believe what I was reading.
But I mean, it was in black and white,
and it was completely public.
You could exactly figure out
how many inches can you move the barbed wire
before an alarm goes off.
One of the most intriguing things I found
was the words that the security guards can use
if they are under duress.
And in this case, it was banana pancake.
It was really an enormous breach of security
that anyone who wants to do harm or get onto that base
could really make a use of.
So not only were US service members
leaking this kind of data from Volkel in the Netherlands,
they were also doing this from military bases in Belgium,
in Germany and Italy, and in Turkey as well.
So much stuff is hiding in plain sight.
The only tool that it really took to discover this
was a Google search.
Coming across these cards that contain information
really showed me that there was something here going on
that I had to investigate further.
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So, we had the flashcard data sets,
but we need to verify the information.
A lot of these flashcard sets were made by usernames, by profiles,
and sometimes a soldier was using his real name.
He found that the names were those that belong to
serving members of US personnel.
In some cases, he was able to identify
the division that they served in.
One of the results that I came across
was a Facebook page by a US service member
who had posted a picture of his entire squadron.
And that was probably one of the most stunning things
that we discovered in this investigation.
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Showed some people next to a bomb.
And you know, the mind races, doesn’t it?
Who are these people? What is the bomb? Is it live?
[music playing]
What I found chilling was
it was these individuals that were standing next to a bomb,
and, you know, one of them probably uploaded some of these flashcards.
It was shared on an American Facebook.
You only saw American uniforms.
At first, I had no reason to doubt this was just in the United States.
But then I saw a very tiny flag
on a car that was standing on the left side of this picture,
and it was the flag of the Netherlands.
And then I thought, “Well, this is very interesting.”
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There’s, like, one thread, and you pull at it,
and then the whole tapestry kind of unravels.
And then all of a sudden, there’s this cascade of
new relevant pieces of information that’s just coming at you.
And that is where geolocation comes in.
It proves that something was recorded at a certain location,
and that is where the data becomes undeniable.
There’s only one military airbase in the Netherlands
which has US nuclear weapons stored.
So I immediately went to Volkel.
Through another leaked map online that you could find through Google,
we could see that the aircraft shelter
that they are standing in front of, where they took the group picture,
was Hangar 532.
That is a number that also appeared in our flashcard sets that we found.
You could see a runway in the background,
and there are some trees
and a smaller concrete structure close by.
And finally, there is this yellow line
that goes across the floor ...
on which the squadron is standing.
Now, all of these elements can be used to pinpoint
the exact hangar that they’re standing in front of.
Basically, using Google and Facebook,
we’ve uncovered all of this secretive information,
and we managed to connect it to each other.
When we can find the data,
that means anyone can basically find this data.
So I’m pretty sure that this data
might have already ended up in adversaries’ hands.
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Eventually, you’ll have to inform the authorities
because it is a breach of security.
There are certain risks involved.
But we’re also journalists.
So we decided to reach out to each of those defense ministries.
So the Dutch Ministry of Defense replied,
saying that they saw the Facebook picture.
And they also confirmed that it wasn’t supposed to be taken,
let alone published.
The US military basically reiterated that they wouldn’t confirm or deny
the presence of nuclear weapons.
They didn't tell us not to publish.
Clearly, it wasn’t a good look for them.
When we published the article, it really went worldwide.
The reaction was overwhelming,
overwhelmingly supportive in a lot of ways.
The Pentagon replied as well, saying in a press conference
that they would look into this issue of using flashcard apps
and the data that was leaked through them.
The Department of the Air Force is investigating
the suitability of information shared via study flashcards.
And I think, as you also know,
it’s US policy not to neither confirm or deny
the presence or absence of nuclear weapons
in any specific location.
But I’m sure there is information out there
on nuclear secrets that we don’t know about.
Currently, we do live in times
where the risk of nuclear war is elevated.
And that makes it only more important
that we know what’s at stake.
And that is why this investigation and laying it bare matters.