By David Nordell
The British government, still reeling from the highly publicised incident in which a senior civil servant left two compartmentalised Top Secret documents on his commuter train last week, has had to face another embarrassing blow this morning, with the revelation by the ’Independent on Sunday’ that more secret papers had been left on another train on the same day.
Unlike the first two lost documents, briefings on Iraq and al Qa’eda produced at the request of the Ministry of Defence and Home Office by the government’s Joint Intelligence Centre (JIC), the new ones deal with terror finance. According to the ’Independent’ report, they were written for the Financial Action Task Force’s annual conference, which is due to take place in London this week, and included both briefing notes for the British officials due to take part in the conference, and drafts of speeches to be delivered to a reception on Wednesday for the top-level officials from abroad, including Daniel Glaser, the Deputy Assistant Secretary to the US Treasury, and incoming FATF president Antonio Gustavo Rodrigues of Brazil.
An official from HM Treasury quoted by the paper responded "we are extremely concerned about what has happened and will be taking steps to ensure it doesn’t happen in the future," while Lady Neville-Jones, the Conservative opposition’s shadow security minister and herself a former head of JIC, complained that this was "yet another example of a lapse in discipline".
But in spite of the fact that British secrets seem to go missing every week of the year, something that should be a real cause for concern in a country that already faced several home-grown terror attacks and constantly faces the risk of more, and whose troops are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is something faintly ridiculous about the panicked headlines in the British newspapers, all of which picked up the original story from the ’Independent’. If, as the newspaper report implied, the documents referred to FATF’s concerns that Iran doesn’t have effective controls on money laundering, or laws against terror financing and the financing of its nuclear arms programme, then there is nothing new or secret there.
On the contrary, we of the Terror Finance Blog have been reporting and analysing the risks associated with Iran’s terror financing and the ineffective international sanctions regime consistently for the last two years. In the same way, we have reported and analysed terror financing issues in the Far East, the Palestinian territories, the Balkans, Morocco, home-grown terror cells in the UK and USA, the Horn of Africa, the inherent weaknesses of the counter-terror finance regime, and more. And, I dare say, apart from the Whitehall bureaucratese and security classifications, and perhaps a few details that genuinely need to be classified, our intelligence product is every bit as good as what was discovered on the train from Waterloo station on Wednesday.
The temptation is very strong to use this sorry incident as another opportunity to mock the leaky Whitehall civil service, along the lines of "roll up! Get your secret documents here." But that would really be missing the point, which is that most of the serious analysis of terror financing and money laundering can be, indeed is, done by open-source analysts like ourselves, on a completely public Internet site; and that the bureaucratic instinct to keep briefing documents (as opposed to raw intelligence product) secret is more likely to be counter-productive than to help the decision-makers reach useful and coherent policy. Actually, if the mandarins of HM Treasury really wanted to have an effect on FATF’s future as the world coordinating body for AML-CTF policy, they could have done a lot worse than to invite the entire team of the Terror Finance Blog to brief the conference on what’s wrong with that policy and its implementation. We’re not holding our breath.
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