Brits: What Is It with You and Trains and Top-Secret Documents?

[Siam_Sam]

Story here. Not once, but TWICE in only a few days, a set of confidential, top-secret, eyes-only documents on British terrorism were found left on a train. And it’s happened before, too, apparently. Do your agents routinely wander around with this sort of stuff on them? Is there a special Lost and Found counter where agents can inquire about lost state secrets?

[carnivorousplant]

There’s a Kim Philby joke here, something about skipping across the border with a briefcase full of money, but it’s just not working.

[chicken_wire]

At least they know where to look now when they’re a few top secrets short.

[Angua]

Hey, its not just us Brits that do that! The late John Wheeler left some pretty damned important documents on trains too! From Greg Herken’s Brotherhood of the Bomb:

Finding the AEC similarly uncooperative, Walker finally turned for help to Princeton’s John Wheeler, who had been the committee’s ally on the H-bomb and in the second-lab debates. Walker sent Wheeler four pages of his draft chronology, plus two pages taken from a classified Los Alamos history. The six-page sheaf of top-secret documents contained references to the 1945 superbomb conference, details of the design of the Mike device, and a précis of the two dueling chronologies prepared by Bethe and Teller.

  On the evening of January 6, 1953, Wheeler and a colleague set out from Princeton by overnight train for a meeting with Walker in Washington.  When the physicist arrived at the Capitol early the following morning, he telephoned Borden in a panic to announce that he had lost the document on the train en route, presumably during a trip to the lavatory.  After dismantling Wheeler’s briefcase with a pocketknife on the committee’s conference table, without results, Borden notified the FBI.  The bureau ordered the Pullman car in which Wheeler had been riding put on a separate siding and minutely examined, while other agents walked the tracks all the way back to Trenton, New Jersey, and interviewed the car’s passengers.  But no trace of the lost document was found.

  Informed of the incident, Eisenhower immediate suspected an ‘inside job’ and wondered aloud whether Borden might actually have been colluding with Fuchs all along.  Incredulous that so much sensitive information could be treated so carelessly, Ike summoned the AEC commissioners—‘like errant schoolboys,’ one said—before him in the Oval Office.” 

[mks57]

I don’t understand why the documents were ever allowed out of a secure area in the first place. Normally, top secret documents have to be transported by special courier from one secure facility to another. You don’t just shove them in your briefcase and head home.

[GorillaMan]

@mks57

I don’t understand why the documents were ever allowed out of a secure area in the first place. Normally, top secret documents have to be transported by special courier from one secure facility to another. You don’t just shove them in your briefcase and head home.

Perhaps just arrongance by a senior official, who saw such rules as only applying to the minions beneath them.

[Larry_Mudd]

@Angua

Hey, its not just us Brits that do that! The late John Wheeler left some pretty damned important documents on trains too! From Greg Herken’s Brotherhood of the Bomb:

More recently…

The foreign minister of Canada resigned on Tuesday after it emerged he left classified information in the apartment of a former girlfriend linked to members of a biker gang.

Maybe I am stretching for a connection to the O.P., or maybe I read too much O.C. and Stiggs in the eighties, but when I hear “former girlfriend linked to members…” the first thing I think is…

Aw, never mind.

[garius]

I like to think that it proves that our public transport system is pretty good - else they’d be leaving them in the back of taxis.

@GorillaMan

Perhaps just arrongance by a senior official, who saw such rules as only applying to the minions beneath them.

Pretty much. Back when i was a techie in the Civil Service, me and my equivalents in various other departments used to keep a list of Senior Civil Servants who’d be first against the wall when the revolution came - mainly because they engaged in behaviour such as this, or insisted on doing other stuff that massively compromised security. The list was about the only bit of inter-departmental cooperation that worked flawlessly.

My personal favourite story was about a senior MOD official who not only wrote down all his username/password combinations on a bit of paper in his wallet, but also helpfully included a list of the various systems they provided access for.

Whilst bombastically boasting about his computer illiteracy, he showed this list to one of the tech security guys at the christmas party who promptly spat beer in his face in pure shock.

[Rayne_Man]

Things have get even worse :- Daily Mash