With a new round of document leaks from the whistleblower organization WikiLeaks expected on Monday, a separate leak of a letter related to a previous leak suggests administration claims regarding the risks to intelligence sources were, as with so many statements beforehand, a lie.

The August letter, from Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to Senate Armed Services Committee chair Sen. Carl Levin (D – MI), conceded that the WikiLeaks documents related to the Afghan War did not expose any sensitive intelligence sources. He insisted the documents were still a threat to national security.

The private letter was released at roughly the same time that Secretary Gates and other Pentagon officials were making public proclamations about the number of people WikiLeaks had potentially killed in releasing the information. NATO conceded to CNN today that no such deaths ever occurred, and the letter suggests Secretary Gates knew this even as he was making the claims.

The WikiLeaks documents revealed that the military’s public comments and testimony to Congress about the overall situation in Afghanistan were starkly different from the information they had available to them. WikiLeaks has another 15,000 Afghan War documents planned for some unknown future release date, as well as the 400,000 Iraq War documents which should be released imminently.