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Another Voice

Matthew Parris

Wednesday, 18th June 2008

It’s all too easy to leave Top Secret papers lying around — I should know

News last week that police are investigating a ‘serious’ security breach after a civil servant lost top-secret documents containing the latest intelligence on al-Qa’eda sent a shiver of alarmed reminiscence down my spine.

The unnamed Cabinet Office employee apparently breached strict security rules when he left the papers, in an orange cardboard folder, on the seat of a train bound for Surrey. It just would be Surrey. Apparently the papers were classified Top Secret.

Mine were more secret than that. Top Secret isn’t the top secret classification — or wasn’t in 1976. There were (to the best of my recollection) two more secret grades above Top Secret. I think they were Penumbra and — most secret of all — Umbra. And given that I was only a Grade Three administrative trainee in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and allowed to see these papers, there must have been grades above and beyond Umbra, not dreamed of in my philosophy.

What I cannot remember is what the papers were about. Most Intelligence stuff (and in the Western European Department we saw a lot of it) was boring and inconsequential: bits and pieces of gathered information which might or might not be significant if studied in the context of other information which we did not have. Perhaps these concerned the Italian Communist party, about which we were all in a great flap in the FCO in the 1970s.

And I left them strewn around. On my desk. Where cleaners and messengers and telephone engineers and anybody who cared to wander into an entirely unsecured ‘Third Room’ at King Charles Street, could see, read, steal or photograph them. They were there for the whole weekend. Returning on Monday, I was told that the Head of Department wished to see me at once — and why. My heart sank. We had a sort of ‘three strikes and you’re out’ office policy as regarded serious security breaches, and this (I think) was my second.

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