Secrets

Yet another of our country’s secrets were lost over the weekend। This is the ninth recorded incident over the last few months. It must set a record for ineptitude never before achieved.

Several thoughts occur to me. Perhaps there are just so many bits of secret information being transported around the country that the sheer scale of the transportation of these bits and pieces will result in some of them being mislaid.

Another theory could be that for some strange reason a whole bunch of our most senior secret bureaucrats all decided to get into their nearest train, bus, taxi, airplane or public space so that they could leave top secret information laying around in an envelope marked Top Secret.

We now know that these lapses were not caused by theft of these articles or breaches in internal security. It seems as though, in the majority of cases, senior officials simply walked out of their offices with vital documents that they then appear to have forgotten and “mislaid.”

A person I know, who used to work in Intelligence, told me of another possibility. He stated that this series of events looked much more like a series of attempted “dead letter drops” in which an agent was intending topass information on to a third party. He does know much more about this type of thing than me, but although my normal inclination is to heartily subscribe to the cock up theory I can’t see how any organization would get it so wrong so often and so publicly, unless they wanted to.

There is also a disturbing uniformity to the reactions of the people finding such documents, folders, computers and discs. Almost every time the offending lost item has been handed in to the BBC or a newspaper and then on to the police or security services. Personally I find this strange, as I would deliver an item of such type to the police or directly to the security service. Why would you give it to the BBC or a newspaper first?

All these accidents and oversights where items of top secret or a confidential nature follow a disturbing pattern. They all give the appearance of overwhelming official incompetence. Do you believe that?

Has everyone suddenly become totally stupid? There is another possibility, and this is so far fetched it makes you stop and think. Perhaps this series of errors was not a bunch of innocent accidents. Is it possible that there are people within the security services who decided there needed to be a change in the way the government was handling intelligence issues. What better way to weaken and demoralize senior government than by discrediting it?

If you wanted to achieve this goal there would be no better method than a series of accidents such as these. Is this not more likely than 9 separate, serious incidents in less than one year?

I leave you to draw your own conclusions whilst we all carefully monitor progress on what’s sure to be an interesting series of investigations.