Perhaps the goal is like Nixon’s with respect to North Vietnam, to make the opponent think you are capable of something horrendous so that it backs off?
Either sending a message (see the exposed Chinese agent article upthread) or they’re destroying documents and have so many to dispose of by a deadline that they can’t dispose of them through their normal secure means. I.E., have to dispose of 50K pages of documents in 24 hours but their secure shredders can physically only shred 30K in that amount of time.
Maybe they figured with all the cities burning, nobody would notice.