There is an old saying that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Sometimes it can be an expensive painting found at a garage sale, or sometimes it can be national secrets sold at a recycling station. There are countless stories of the former – as a random viewing of the PBS series Antiques Roadshow will remind us. However, earlier this month, The Associated Press reported that a military history buff in China purchased four discarded books for less than $1 at a recycling station.
The books were treasures of a different variety, containing confidential military documents.
“Mr. Zhang thought to himself that he had ‘bought’ the country’s military secrets and brought them home, but if someone with ulterior motives were to buy them, the consequences would be unimaginable,” the Chinese Ministry of State Security announced in a post on social media, without identifying exactly what was in the documents.
The four books were part of 200 that were supposed to be shredded. Instead, two military employees decided to sell the contents – weighing around 65 pounds – to the recycling center as paper waste. Following the disclosure that Zhang, reported to be a former employee of a state-owned company and who collects military periodicals, purchased the books, China has cracked down on the handling and disposal of such materials.
However, as the news wire also reported, “China’s opaque state security bodies and legal system often make it difficult to tell what is considered a state secret.”
Pandora’s Box or A Cabinet of Secrets
This is hardly the first time classified documents have ended up being accidentally tossed out. In 2018, hundreds of Top Secret and highly classified Australian documents – dubbed “The Cabinet Files” – were found in two locked filing cabinets sold as part of a government sale of old office equipment in Canberra. The buyer, who had to use a drill to break the secure padlocks on the cabinets, was stunned to find the documents inside!
The incident served as a reminder that it might be wise to check the drawers before tossing out a filing cabinet, but it also led to an investigation that further shed light on the fact that the Australian Federal Police (AFP) had lost nearly 400 national security files between 2008 and 2013. In addition, nearly 200 top-secret codeword-protected and sensitive documents were also left in the office of senior minister Penny Wong when a new government took power following the 2013 elections.
Lost Laptops and Docs Left on a Train
In March 2008, the UK-based Guardian newspaper first reported that more than 1,000 laptop computers had gone missing from various departments in the British government. The investigation that followed found that the Ministry of Defence (MoD) was the most negligent, losing 503 laptops and 23 desktop PCs between 1998 and 2008. It is unclear how one loses a desktop!
The Department of Health, Ministry of Justice, and Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs also reported misplacing laptops. Moreover, the Home Office, Foreign Office, Department for Transport, and Department for Business didn’t disclose any losses – so the number of mislaid computers could be even higher.
Just months after the disclosure of the lost laptops, the BBC reported that an unnamed Cabinet Office employee also left two reports on a train that contained detailed top-secret intelligence about Al-Qaeda. The files were found by another commuter and handed to the BBC, which subsequently handed the documents to the police. The individual who was later named by other media outlets was found guilty of breaching the Official Secrets Act and fined £2,500.
Classified Documents in the U.S. – Didn’t We hear something about this?
It was also disclosed last year that President Joe Biden had inadvertently had classified documents in his former private D.C. office and even in his garage at his home in Delaware. Even more infamously, former President Donald Trump is now facing charges for his alleged mishandling of classified documents that he retained after leaving the White House.
Yet, Biden and Trump are hardly alone it seems.
The National Archives also reported last year that every administration since Ronald Reagan has mishandled classified records. Since 2010, the National Archives has received calls from 80 libraries around the country that were inadvertently sent classified papers from lawmakers including members of Congress.
