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Whitehall Blunderers Leave Secrets Everywhere

By David Stringer, PA News


Home Secretary David Blunkett’s own confidential police files fell into public hands in one of a string of blunders by Whitehall and intelligence services officials involving sensitive documents.

Mr Blunkett’s security details, which included instructions for his home alarm system and daily routines, were discovered on a street outside a Sheffield pub.

Aerial photographs of his home were also attached to the 11-page dossier, marked “Confidential. Not to be copied“, picked up outside the Woodseats Palace in June 2002.

A month earlier, a laptop containing secret information about Britain’s air-to-air missile system had been discovered in a skip in Hertfordshire.

The computer, found in Stevenage, outside the offices of MBDA Missile Systems, contained details of arms sales to Spain, Pakistan and several Middle East countries.

Documents on the hard-drive also revealed Nato fears about delays in replacing Tornado jets with the new Eurofighter.

Last July it was revealed that six laptop computers had been stolen from Whitehall, including three machines from the Cabinet Office.
In May 2002, the Daily Mirror newspaper was given a Ministry of Defence laptop containing sensitive information intended to be read only by the Prime Minister, the head of the civil service and defence chiefs.

That year it was revealed that 1,933 Government computers had been lost or stolen and a crackdown was ordered to tighten up laptop security.

Details of a new weapons systems were on a computer left behind in a cab by an Ministry of Defence worker in April 2001, after he caught a taxi from Waterloo train station.

Scotland Yard launched an immediate hunt for the £1,700 Dell Latitude after the employee made a frantic call to police.

Spy chiefs were also forced to take unusual action in 2000 when an MI6 operative lost his computer after drinking at a tapas bar in Pimlico, central London.

Newspaper adverts were placed in the press offering a “substantial reward” for the return of the machine which had been left behind in a cab.

In that March, an MoD laptop containing sensitive files on Northern Ireland was stolen from an MI5 officer at Paddington Station in London.

The then armed forces minister John Spellar also had his computer stolen in the same month when thieves broke into his home in Bromley, Kent.

It contained only details about his constituency and raiders left without touching boxes containing highly sensitive defence and nuclear information.

In December 2000, an MI5 agent left a briefcase full of intelligence secrets on a train after he alighted in Dorset – prompting police to conduct an exhaustive search of scores of trains and stations.