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It’s in the mail: how submarine secrets surfaced in Australia
Secrets surfaced
In late April 2013 a Sydney postman reached into his satchel and pulled out a small envelope containing the secrets of India’s new submarine fleet.
He dropped the letter, with a Singapore stamp on it, in a private post office box and moved on.
The envelope, containing a small data disc, remained there for days, along with a Telstra bill and junk mail, before being picked up on April 24, 2013, by a man who took it home and pushed the disk into his computer.
This week the contents of that disk have become front-page news in Australia, India and France as each country grapples with the ramifications of an Edward Snowden-style leak of confidential documents disclosing the entire secret combat capability of India’s new Scorpene-class submarine fleet.
The leak is of more than passing interest to Australia because the documents come from the same French shipbuilder, DCNS, that will design 12 submarines for the Royal Australian Navy in the country’s largest and most expensive defence project.
But it is of far greater urgency to India, which fears that if a foreign spy service has acquired the data its six Scorpene submarines, costing a total of $US3 billion ($3.93bn), could be dead in the water before they sail. France is also in damage control as it tries to understand and explain how 22,400 of its secret documents on India’s submarines crossed the world to be delivered by a Sydney postie.
None of these three countries was aware of the leak until this week, when The Australian asked DCNS Australia on Monday afternoon to comment on an astonishing data file it had seen, marked “Restricted Scorpene India”, which laid bare almost every secret capability of India’s new submarines. These included the contracted parameters and capabilities of the submarine’s stealth features, its noise signatures at different speeds, its range, endurance, diving depths, magnetic and infra-red data. In other words, the full suite of submarine capability spread over 22,400 documents that any navy would consider to be classified and highly sensitive.
The news set off a remarkable chain of events, which says much about the high stakes involved for each country. On receiving questions about the leak from The Australian on Monday, the Canberra office of France’s DCNS immediately deferred to its head office in Paris.
The ramifications of a news story revealing the mega-data dump on such a sensitive project were immediately obvious. India would be furious, but so too would Malaysia, Chile and Brazil, which also have, or will soon have, DCNS Scorpene submarines. And Australia was also likely to be concerned about the security of its own new partnership with the French defence giant.
DCNS officials in Paris urgently checked their files, looking for signs of espionage.
On Tuesday morning, DCNS officials in Paris came back to their Canberra DCNS colleagues with the news that they could find no immediate evidence of a security breach that would explain such a massive data leak.
The DCNS team in Canberra met to workshop the problem. It was a sobering moment for them. The tight-knit group led by Sean Costello, former chief of staff to former defence minister David Johnston, were considered heroes by DCNS in Paris for pulling off an unlikely victory against the more heavily favoured Germans and Japanese to win the lucrative contract to design Australia’s future submarines. The leak was not their fault, but they would be saddled with its legacy, which would be that their commercial rivals would exploit every opportunity to say the French can never be trusted with Australia’s secrets.
The group reasoned that the most likely scenario was that a commercial competitor was seeking to sabotage the company and had somehow obtained and then leaked the data. The obvious suspects were the losers in the submarine bid, Germany and Japan, but why would they wait for four months after the decision to strike?
If the leak was a global attack on DCNS then Norway, rather than Australia, would have been the obvious place to strike given that DCNS is now trying to pitch its Scorpene submarine to the Norwegian Navy, whereas the Australian deal was already stitched up.
DCNS had no answers and so it was assumed the most likely source of the leak was from the Indian side. The company wrote a carefully worded statement that implied — but did not state — that the leak came from India.
By late Tuesday afternoon DCNS realised it had to tell the Australian government that some very bad news was to be published the next day. The company called the head of Defence’s Future Submarine Project, Rear Admiral Greg Sammut, who then called Defence Department secretary Dennis Richardson. Defence Industry Minister Christopher Pyne was also briefed.
In New Delhi, India’s Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar was asleep when an aide woke him at midnight and showed him the report on The Australian’s website.
For Parrikar the news was devastating. He had a strong personal investment in India’s Scorpene submarines. Just over a year earlier, on April 6, 2015, he had watched the “undocking” ceremony in Mumbai as the first of India’s six Scorpene submarines, Kalvari, meaning Tiger Shark, was celebrated. The new submarine, decked in garlands and Indian flags, represented the pinnacle of the Indian Navy. A prayer ceremony was held to bless the boat.
The Scorpenes were a badly needed replacement for India’s ageing fleet of Russian Kilo-class and German Type 209 submarines that were almost three decades old and often confined to port with technical problems.
The DCNS Scorpene, however, was ordered in 2005 to spearhead India’s submarine fleet because, it boasted, in the words of the
Indian Express: “Stealth features (which) give it invulnerability, unmatched by many submarines.”
But as Parrikar woke, the invulnerability of his pet project was in doubt. He ordered his chief of navy to launch an urgent investigation into the leak and what damage it had potentially caused.
At 6.30am in Australia, Pyne had read
The Australian’s report and was soon on the phone to Richardson to discuss how to respond.
Sources say Richardson was of the view that Australia’s own security arrangements surrounding the new submarine project were already robust and there was no need to reinvent the wheel on security just because of the leak.
Pyne agreed, but also wanted to give a gentle message to the French. He asked Richardson to convey “a reminder” to DCNS that Australia expects the security of classified information on the future submarine project to be as tight as Australia’s handling of security information with its closest ally, the US. The subtext was, this is serious, don’t let this happen again.
But Pyne also knew the story would run strongly in Australia unless he tried to kill it quickly, so at about 8.30am he issued a press release claiming — without having access to the 22,400 leaked documents — that Defence had advised that the leak would have “no bearing” on Australia’s submarine program.
It was a public statement at odds with his private instruction to Richardson, but in Pyne’s view the quicker he could wash Australia’s hands of what he knew would be a nasty international furore the better.
India woke on Wednesday to the report that its submarine fleet had been potentially compromised by the leak of thousands of secret documents. Within hours it was the biggest story in the country. Under pressure to provide a quick answer, Parrikar said the leak appeared to be a case of hacking but he offered nothing to support this theory, which he later backed away from.
In Paris, DCNS realised it had a public relations and security disaster on its hands, with the story being reported on the front page of the newspaper Le Monde, followed the next day by a front-page cartoon lampooning the French security services.
DCNS backed away from the claim that India had caused the leak and the French government stepped in to announce that its defence security officials would investigate.
The Indian government also announced an investigation, but with every major Indian newspaper reporting the story on its front page, the government urged patience until its navy could assess the leak and the damage caused.
But it seems that the story behind this leak may be more incompetence than espionage — more Austin Powers than James Bond. The Weekend Australian has been told by sources that the data was removed from DCNS in Paris in 2011 by a former French Navy officer who quit the service in the early 1970s and worked for French defence companies for more than 30 years before becoming a subcontractor to DCNS.
Sources say they believe this subcontractor somehow copied the sensitive data from DCNS in France and, along with a French colleague, took it to a Southeast Asian country. If so, he broke the law and may face prosecution.
The two men worked in that Southeast Asian country carrying out unclassified naval defence work.
The speculation is that the data on the Scorpene was removed to serve as a reference guide for the former naval officer’s new job, but it is unclear why anyone would risk breaking the law by taking classified data for such a purpose.
The two men are then said to have the fallen out with their employer, a private company run by a Western businessman. They were sacked and refused re-entry to their building. At least one of the men asked to retrieve the data on the Scorpene but they were refused and the company — possibly not knowing the significance of the data — held on to it.
The secret data was then sent to the company’s head office in Singapore, where the company’s IT chief — again probably not knowing its significance — tried to load it on an internet server for the person in Sydney who was slated to replace the two sacked French workers.
The data was placed on a server on April 18, 2013, and it was then that it was dangerously vulnerable to hacking or interception by a foreign intelligence service. It is not known whether the data stayed on this server for a few days or for a year. It is not known if any foreign intelligence service obtained it during this time.
Unable to send such a large file over the net and not knowing the significance of the data, the Singapore company sent it on a data disk by regular post to Sydney.
When the recipient, who was experienced in defence issues, opened the file on his home computer he was stunned. He was expecting to read notes on a low-level naval program, but before him lay the secret capabilities of the new Indian submarine fleet.
The data was not encrypted so he transferred it to an encrypted disk. That evening the man wiped the old disk with special software, grabbed a hammer and smashed it to pieces in his backyard.
He placed the new encrypted disk in a locked filing cabinet in his office and there it remained for more than two years.
In the back room of Cafe Loco, in the Melbourne suburb of Elsternwick, the man arrives, sits down and pulls out a data disk from his pocket. He orders a hamburger then slips the disk into his laptop. He says he has something to show me, but not give to me.
Why are you doing this I ask?
He replies: “In the wake of the recent future submarine decision (in Australia) this matter went from one of a very serious breach for both France and India to a matter of national security significance to Australia and the US.”
In other words, he wants Australia to know that its future submarine partner, France, has already lost control of secret data on India’s new submarines. His hope is that this will spur the Turnbull government and DCNS to step up security to ensure Australia’s $50 billion submarine project does not suffer the same fate.
He says he is a whistleblower and maintains that revealing to the world, via The Australian, that this classified data exists in a dangerously uncontrolled form is worthwhile because it will serve Australia’s interests even if it causes an international furore.
He presses a button on his computer and his screen flickers to life.
Here in a Melbourne cafe, amid the clatter of plates, laughter and the smell of coffee, he scrolls through the secrets of India’s submarine fleet. He has not broken any laws and the authorities know who he is. He plans to surrender the disk to the government on Monday.
Source:http://webcache.googleusercontent.c...bb358581cf27819acfb+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=in
