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| Indi's 1st Scorpene class submarine prior to launch |
Pierre Tran in Paris, Vivek Raghuvanshi in New Delhi, Nigel Pittaway in Australia, and Christopher P. Cavas in Washington contributed to this report.
The revelation Aug. 24 by an Australian newspaper that thousands of pages of presumably secret submarine documents were on the loose shook governments in Canberra, New Delhi and Paris. The news threatened the operational security of India’s new Scorpene-class submarines, embarrassed French shipbuilder DCNS, and raised security questions about Australia’s recent Australian $50 billion deal with DCNS for 12 Shortfin Barracuda submarines, of a design similar to the Scorpenes.
As reported by The Australian newspaper, a reporter was shown samples of up to 24,500 pages of highly technical data on the Scorpene submarine, an advanced, non-nuclear design that has been exported by DCNS to several countries. The documents, said The Australian, include highly technical drawings, specifications and operational capability descriptions of the submarine’s stealth features; noise signatures at different speeds; range, endurance, diving depths, magnetic and infrared data.
The information, The Australian reported, would be considered classified and highly sensitive by any navy.
Initially, there were fears that some sort of Wikileaks-like situation had occurred, or that this was a case of industrial espionage. But on Aug. 27, The Weekend Australian reported it seemed to be more a story of a disgruntled employee who initially stole the data, followed by mishandling of the information by a contractor. The story, the publication said, seemed to be “more Austin Powers than James Bond.”
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| An operational Scorpene class submarine |
Initially, said The Weekend Australian, it’s believed a French subcontractor copied the data from DCNS in France in 2011, and it was taken to “a Southeast Asian country” – reported by Reuters to be India. After a fallout with his employer, the subcontractor was terminated, but the data was left on a company computer. The information was then sent to the company’s head office in Singapore, and in April 2013 the data was placed on a server. It is not clear, The Weekend Australian said, how long the data resided on the server or whether any foreign intelligence service obtained the data.
But the complete data package was copied to a disk, dropped in the mail, and sent to an unspecified person in Sydney, Australia who, realizing the significance, copied it to an encrypted disk, destroyed the original and stored it in a locked filing cabinet for more than two years.
More recently, The Weekend Australian reported, the man showed samples of the data to a reporter while meeting in a Melbourne suburb. The man, the publication said, called himself a whistleblower and wanted to demonstrate that a serious security breach existed in a dangerously uncontrolled form, and that France has already lost control of secret data on India’s submarines.
His hope, The Weekend Australian said, was to spur Australia and DCNS to step up security to ensure Australia’s submarine program doesn’t suffer the same fate.
The Australian government tried to play down the story.
Read the full story at DefenseNews