Weapons expert in dock for ‘ breaking Official Secrets Act’
Analyst ‘took revenge on State with security leak’
A defence analyst leaked weapons secrets because police did not take his homophobic assault claims seriously, the Old Bailey heard yesterday.
Simon finch, 50, who worked for Bae Systems and QinetiQ, is said to have written down confidential information from memory and sent it to nine email addresses.
The alleged security leak came seven months after he was made unemployed in february 2018.
Mark Heywood Qc, prosecuting, said that it was a breach of the Official Secrets Act relating to a missile system ‘ upon which the security of the realm partly depends’.
Jurors were told that finch was motivated by apparent mistreatment by police, the NHS and his employers, relating to two serious homophobic assaults against him.
Among the perceived slights was a claim had been refused quick access to the toilet at a Merseyside Police Station. finch also claimed he had been dragged along the floor and humiliated by custody officers.
The court heard he had reached the conclusion that ‘he should have no care for national security if the nation had no care for his security’. When a criminal probe was launched into the alleged disclosure, finch refused to hand over passcodes to his electronic devices, the court heard.
The software expert’s health had been deteriorating for several years before the alleged intelligence leak and he was arrested in January 2016 for being in public armed with a machete and a hammer. He received a suspended prison sentence.
Mr Heywood said the material leaked by finch was of the highest possible confidentiality and an expert assessment found its release could give an enemy of Britain an understanding of the missile system and ‘methods of countering it’.
Mr Heywood said finch’s downward spiral began in 2013 when police failed to respond to two homophobic attacks within the space of six weeks.
‘That reaction led him to plot a very deliberate kind of retaliation,’ he told the court.
‘He first wrote down extensive details that he could remember – he’s a highly intelligent man – details in the national interest that had been gained through his privileged and trusted access to secret information. He then distributed that information.
‘Both in making the records, which he did in the first place, and then deciding to make those disclosures he was acting consciously in breach first of his own solemn promises he had written down in declarations over the years, and second of the law, particularly the criminal law, for this kind of information.
‘His motivations, he said, included that he had been repeatedly failed by the UK state, in other words, this was retaliative, retributive.
This included the police, his employer, the Independent Office for Police conduct, his local NHS mental health trust, his trade union, his Member of Parliament and others including those who he had gone to for legal advice.
‘In other words all those people were responsible, and his lack of redress and refusal of justice, led him to the conclusion that he should have no care for national security if the nation had no care for his security. Those disclosures were, and are, of a kind damaging to the interests of the nation.’
finch, from Swansea, denies breaching the Official Secrets Act and failing to disclose information on three electronic devices.
Jurors will hear more details about the weapons system during sessions of the court that will exclude journalists and member of the public. The trial continues.
‘Privileged and trusted access’