Secret files held by the Guardian ‘put lives of spies at risk’
THE lives of British agents may have been put at risk by a Guardian journalist’s possession of top- secret documents stolen from the US government, a senior Cabinet adviser has warned. Documents seized from the reporter’s boyfriend, David Miranda, were so sensitive that agents have since had to be moved to protect their lives.
Oliver Robbins, deputy national security adviser at the Cabinet Office, went on the record to warn that ‘lives may be put at risk’ if the documents fall in to the wrong hands.
Court papers released yesterday also revealed the incredibly lax security used around the material, with Mr Miranda apparently carrying a password for some of the computer documents written on a scrap of paper.
Security sources also said that, as a result of the theft, codes for tens of thousands of sensitive documents have had to be changed.
Details of the chaos caused at the highest levels of Britain’s security and intelligence agencies by the leaks emerged in official court sub-
‘Serious damage to national security’
missions about material seized from Mr Miranda, the boyfriend of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald.
Mr Miranda, 28, who is Brazilian, was detained at Heathrow on August 18 as he passed through the airport on his way from Berlin to Rio.
He was found to be carrying nine hard disks and memory sticks including secret files leaked by former CIA analyst Edward Snowden, and was questioned for nine hours before being released.
Mr Miranda’s detention under terrorism powers provoked outrage from civil liberties groups.
But the newspaper’s initial story described him only as Mr Greenwald’s boyfriend, and made no mention of the fact that he was carrying secret material or that the Guardian was paying for his flights.
Despite only decrypting one third of the material, police have already discovered 58,000 classified documents, many marked secret or top secret.
In a statement to the High Court, Mr Robbins said the material was likely to contain details of secret techniques used to prevent terror attacks, personal data about agents at home and abroad and ‘other intelligence activities vital to UK national security’.
The release of the information could pose a ‘direct threat to the life of UK government employees’, as well as threaten the lives of their families.
Mr Robbins warned the judges – who granted additional powers to the police to examine the classified material – that the information that had been decrypted ‘ has had a direct impact on decisions taken in regard to staff deployments and is therefore impacting operational effectiveness’.
He wrote: ‘The material seized is highly likely to describe techniques which have been crucial in life-saving counter-terrorism operations, and other intelligence activities vital to UK national security. The compromise of these methods would do serious damage to UK national security, and ultimately risk lives.’
He added: ‘A particular concern for HMG is the possibility that the identity of a UK intelligence officer might be revealed.’
GCHQ, the Government’s communications headquarters, and the police are using a large amount of resources to decrypt and process the material, Mr Robbins said.
He warned of the urgent need to identify what other material is on the hard drives ‘to assess the risks to sensitive intelligence sources and methods, and the threat to intelligence agency staff should their identities or details of their operational tradecraft be obtained by hostile actors’.
Mr Robbins said the Guardian’s publication of details from the documents had already caused ‘ real and serious damage’ to national security.
Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian, branded his claims ‘unsubstantiated and inaccurate’.
He said: ‘The Guardian took every decision on what to publish very slowly and very carefully and when we met with government officials in July they acknowledged that we had displayed a “responsible” attitude.
‘The Government’s behaviour does not match their rhetoric in trying to justify and exploit this dismaying blurring of terrorism and journalism.’