LONDON: During high security alerts in the UK, we’re familiar with the “show of strength”, in which tanks patrol the fences at London’s Heathrow airport and cops wait at the end of railway platforms, machine guns on hip and sniffer dogs at feet. This is part of a psychological battle, in which the British state tries to send a message to assailants: “Don’t be silly.” And if, in an era of suicide killers, such measures may encourage rather than deter assailants, then the garnish of armoury at least has the benefit of reassuring the public that the security forces know what they are doing.

But it follows from this theory that there is also a possibility of a “show of weakness” which could have the opposite effects. Such a gesture of ineffectuality might take the form of a UK spook leaving a top secret intelligence dossier on a commuter train. For maximum image damage, this file would contain a summary for the prime minister of Al Qaeda’s “vulnerabilities” and the way of dealing with them. In the mindgame of symbolic moves, the message sent by this one to terrorists is: “We are silly.”

As security goofs go, this one is almost perfectly embarrassing because of the transport method involved. After Britain’s espionage high command write down their plan for dealing with terrorists who leave bombs on trains, where do they then leave the anti-bomb strategy? And, to maximise the humiliation, our culture is so tuned to whistleblowing that the person who finds the lost property chooses not to return it to the source but to hand it over to the BBC.

Imagine al-Qaeda’s high command helpless with laughter in their caves at the revelation that the British nation’s defenders, on the 5.45 from London-Waterloo station, will occasionally swap a newspaper for a folder stamped “For Your Eyes Only”. If Prime Minister Gordon Brown was accused of transmuting from Stalin to Mr Bean, Her Majesty’s Secret Service has also now been taken over by a Rowan Atkinson role: from James Bond to Johnny English overnight.

And the prowling, growling cop-and-dog combos at train hubs will be far less reassuring now, as commuters wonder whether the hound would sniff out any classified material accidentally abandoned in the carriage.

What’s alarming about this breach is that most errors in anti-terrorism occur because of flaws in the system that have not previously been detected. The first users of computers and mobile phones did not appreciate their vulnerability to hacking; Lockerbie and 9/11 happened because terrorists had spotted weaknesses in airport security.

But, for months, newspapers have been filled with stories about employees of the state mislaying sensitive information, as CD-roms of benefit applications and learner drivers became lost property. In that context, you would think that even the DHSS [Department of Health & Social Security] never mind the HMSS [Her Majesty’s Secret Service] would have a locked-desk policy rather than entrusting secrets to South West Trains. So the spy who came in from the suburbs seems to be like those people who, even now, after all the warnings, fill in those emails from banks asking for your account details.

There is, though, another slight possibility, which is that the dossier could be treated like a free newspaper because its contents were meaningless. Reports suggest that the papers had been prepared at the request of Gordon Brown and the Home Secretary [minister of the interior] Jacqui Smith. But perhaps the chaps in MI5 [Intelligence Service] and MI6 [Secret Service] don’t actually know very much about Al Qaeda’s weaknesses or what to do about them, and so the secrecy of the portfolio was largely notional. Its pages may have been used as a coffee coaster at spook HQ before someone said, spotting a colleague heading for the door with his briefcase: “Do you want to take the ‘vulnerability’ report, old boy, and see if you can, uh, ‘sex it up’ on the way to Surrey.”

Or is it even possible I admit here that two of my favourite novelists are John Le Carre and his American counterpart Charles McCarry that the file was deliberately dropped in order to embarrass the government or a figure in the spy hierarchy, as a result of one of those tensions between the executive and the intelligence services that previously an Iraq War report had usefully exposed?Unfortunately, the two wilder alternatives seem unlikely and this feels like a simple cock-up. After the Brighton bombing failed to kill Margaret Thatcher, the IRA issued a statement that, in the way of Irish terrorism, combined poetry with psychopathy: “You have to be lucky every day; we only have to be lucky once.”

The same is true of bad luck. If something goes wrong for a terrorist organisation the bomber being stopped at the airport gates, the timer failing to engage outside the nightclub the failure merely serves to increase the fear that they are close to another success. But if anti-terrorism makes an error the plumber shot by mistake, the confidential data left on a train public confidence is catastrophically affected. The spooks may say that they have just been unlucky once, but this show of weakness will long undermine any shows of strength.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service