In November, a crime group known as Ares Leaks announced on Telegram that it was selling classified Russian intelligence documents. The group claimed that the records originated from inside the Federal Security Service, or F.S.B.
How Ares Leaks acquired these documents is unclear. The group did not answer when asked. Russian agencies have been hacked before. Perhaps an F.S.B. officer mishandled them or had them stolen. Maybe an insider sold or leaked them, or Ares grabbed them from another criminal group.
The New York Times does not pay its sources or buy stolen documents. But we do accept documents that are provided without cost or strings attached. And it is common practice for sellers like Ares Leaks to share free samples.
In this case, Ares Leaks provided snapshots of Russian intelligence documents and, most important, a complete F.S.B. counterintelligence document about China. More documents were available, the group said, for a negotiable price paid in the cryptocurrency Monero.
The sample document on China appeared to come from the security agency’s Department for Counterintelligence Operations, known as the D.K.R.O. And it offered tantalizing insight into Russia’s relationship with China, one of the most important — and least understood — alliances in modern geopolitics. It described deep concerns in Moscow about Chinese espionage, and it revealed that Russia operates a secretive program to organize and analyze data from the popular Chinese messaging app WeChat.
The document looked consistent with F.S.B. records that have previously been made public. Times reporters who have studied Russian espionage for years analyzed the material and saw nothing immediately suspicious.
The Times also confirmed some details from the document. For instance, we established — independent of the Western intelligence sources we consulted — that the Russian government had in fact been conducting “precautionary briefings” with Russians who travel to China for work.
We took the document to six Western intelligence agencies. All of them confirmed that it appeared authentic, based on its format and content. A few agencies told us that the content was consistent with intelligence that they had collected independently. One went so far as to say that the content was consistent with what it knew about Russia’s views on China and its penetration of Chinese communications.