The general public find out about these losses approximately four to ten years later in January 2018, when mention was made of the situation in one file document within thousands of other top-secret and highly classified documents obtained by the ABC after yet another security breach involving Cabinet papers and other classified files found in old government locked filing cabinets sold at public auction in Canberra.
Even John le Carré would have thought this plot line was nigh on unbelievable - but then he didn't know our very own federal bureaucracy.
ABC
News, 31
January 2018:
The Australian Federal
Police (AFP) lost nearly 400 national security files in five years, according
to a secret government stocktake contained in The Cabinet Files.
The Department of Prime
Minister and Cabinet regularly audits all government departments and agencies
that have access to the classified documents to ensure they are securely
stored.
The missing documents
are not the same files the ABC has obtained.
The classified documents
lost by the AFP are from the powerful National Security Committee (NSC) of the
cabinet, which controls the country's security, intelligence and defence
agenda.
The secretive committee
also deploys Australia's military and approves kill, capture or destroy
missions.
Most of its documents
are marked "top secret" and "AUSTEO", which means they are
to be seen by Australian eyes only.
An email exchange
between the cabinet secretariat and the AFP reveals the documents were lost
between 2008 and 2013……
Troop deployments in
Afghanistan and Iraq, counter-terrorism operations, foreign relations and
Australia's border protection were among the top-secret and sensitive issues
decided in the five-year period.
The cabinet
secretariat's general practice was to give up searching and write off lost
documents if they could not be found after consecutive audits, according to
another document in The Cabinet Files.
Of course it is only three or four years ago that nearly 5,000 secret, confidential and restricted documents from two major federal departments held in a "B Class" secure container ended up in a recycling yard in Canberra.
There was an internal inquiry at the time but that obviously didn't translate into accounting for the whereabouts of all secure containers/filing cabinets and safes holding sensitive documents.
Given the fact that Australia's public broadcaster actually had possession of documents in the latest security breach, rather belatedly the secutity services began to care about national security.
ABC
News, 1
February 2018:
ASIO officers have moved
to secure the thousands of top secret and classified Cabinet files obtained by
the ABC, in early morning operations in Canberra and Brisbane.
Officers delivered safes
to the public broadcaster's Parliament House Bureau and South Bank studios
around 1:00am, just hours after the massive national security breach was
revealed.
The ABC still has access
to the documents, now kept in the safes, and negotiations are still underway
between lawyers for the ABC and the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet
(PM&C).
The department launched
an urgent investigation on Wednesday, after it was revealed the trove of
documents had been discovered in two locked filing cabinets offloaded to a
second-hand furniture depot in Canberra.
The Department of Prime
Minister and Cabinet (PM&C) launched an urgent investigation into how the
massive breach occurred, within an hour of the ABC revealing the trove of
documents.
But the ABC understands
the Australian Federal Police (AFP) are yet to join the inquiry.
* Russian Doll pic found at Google Images
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