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.
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