As he was rushing to attend a soccer match in Newcastle, England, Michael Gibbard stepped on a pile of sensitive military documents.
At first, he thought the papers scattered along a street near the stadium were trash, dumped there from a nearby office building. But when he bent down and examined them closely, he was stunned by what he saw.
Names and ranks of soldiers. Detailed base patrols. Drug test results. Codes to weapon armories.
“I thought, bloody hell, this shouldn’t be here,” said Mr. Gibbard, a 41-year-old owner of a delivery service.
Mr. Gibbard’s accidental discovery this month of what appeared to be hundreds of military documents on an industrial street in Northern England has shocked a country known for zealously protecting state secrets. It also comes as the United States, Britain’s close military ally, has been facing its own crisis over the handling of sensitive national security information, after battle plans in Yemen were discussed in a group chat that included a journalist.
But while the United States’ security breach came about because of a technological blunder on the encrypted app Signal, the apparent error in the United Kingdom was much more analog.
“I thought a lot of this would be online, and there would be military software you’d need to access it,” Mr. Gibbard said. “But here it was, printed off for all the world to see. It was very old-school.”
As he picked documents off the street and out of the gutter, he became aware of just how much material, from threat assessments to mundane requests for leave, he had stumbled upon. “It was like a library of information,” he said.
A Ministry of Defense spokesperson said that the incident was being investigated and that “no sensitive operational defense information is contained within the documents.”
The papers appeared to originate from a black trash bag slumped against a nearby brick wall. As Mr. Gibbard dug through the bag, he noticed a name repeated on the top of some documents: Catterick Garrison.
Mr. Gibbard, who said he had no interest in the military, didn’t know what that was, so he typed the term into Google.
The garrison, he discovered, is a major military base in North Yorkshire, about 50 miles south of Newcastle. It’s the largest garrison in the British Army, and home to more than 13,000 people.
“I was like, How on earth has this bag traveled like 50 minutes away?” Mr. Gibbard said.
More surprising, he added, was that the documents had been printed at all.
“You put your safety in the hands of the military and the government to make sure that this information is kept away from us, so it doesn’t potentially get in the wrong hands,” he said. “And they’re still printing loads and loads of paperwork out, explaining everything.”
After spending a few minutes reading through lists of weapons and phone numbers of high-ranking officers, Mr. Gibbard began to feel uneasy about the position he had found himself in.
He decided to take a photograph — but only one, he said, because he didn’t know if it was legal to have images of the documents. “I can’t imagine the army would let me into the base and start taking photos of all their paperwork, would they?” he said. “So this felt no different.”
After he snapped an image, he called the police.
When no one arrived after about 15 minutes — and with the kickoff to the soccer match moments away — he collected what he judged to be the most sensitive documents and took them to the police at the soccer arena. They found his tale highly suspicious.
“Their reaction was like, ‘Riiiiiight,’” he said. “I said, ‘Wait a minute, I’ve done nothing wrong here, I’m just passing on the information.’”
A Northumbria Police spokesperson confirmed that the department had received a report on March 16 that potentially confidential documents had been found near the center of Newcastle, and said that they had been given to the Ministry of Defense.
When Mr. Gibbard left the soccer match about four hours later, he said, many of the papers were gone, but some remained scattered in the area.
“The timing is quite ironic,” Mr. Gibbard said, pointing to the leaked Signal conversation in the United States.
“I mean, you’ve got these two powerhouses, the U.K. and America,” who, he said, love to “brag about how great they are at everything.”
If that’s true, he added, then “we’re a country that should know how to handle our military paperwork better — same with America.”
Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
