Where’s Agent 007 when you need him? A recent London Times story reported that a British “Intelligence Officer” accidentally left a packet of TOP SECRET British Military documents at a bus stop. We guess his title stressed “Officer” more than “Intelligence”. PERSONAL NOTE: When your editor was 7 years old, a large envelope was delivered to our house marked TOP SECRET. My parents were at first surprised; then worried; then afraid. Their first thought was that this was some form of mail advertising to get your attention. But when we opened the envelope it contained 20 single 8.5 x 11 pages with full size aircraft pictures obviously taken from the air. And the reverse of each page contained the specifications of each plane including something called “radar deception coordinates”. This convinced my parents as to the authenticity of the documents. But what to do with them was another challenge. They debated calling the police because they had seen top secret documents; and they were afraid to discard the papers because they were concerned that someone might later come looking for them. They finally decided to hold onto the documents for a while. After a month to 6 weeks, they destroyed the envelope and gave me the documents to color as I chose. Like all play things they were eventually thrown away. Back in that era, the Cold War, spy exchanges, Communism and the Francis Gary Powers Spy Plane incident had everyone on edge. In that environment–just having a TOP SECRET document in your possession was scary. So it’s not shocking that a British Intelligence Officer mishandled military secrets. Maybe it happens more than we know. We know James Bond would have known what to do; but we didn’t have his number or E mail address.
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